Cool ways to dis­cover new music are Last.fm and Spo­tify, but what about dis­cov­er­ing your old music? Many iTunes lib­rar­ies have loads of tracks that are never played. By set­ting up a Smart Playl­ist in iTunes, you can auto­mat­ic­ally find these unplayed tracks and redis­cover them.

Smart Playl­ists are dynamic playl­ists, you can use them to just select songs from a group of artists or from a whole dec­ade or genre. Songs that match the rules are placed in the playl­ist. If you so choose, these playl­ists update as you work — any music that fits into the smart playl­ist will auto­mat­ic­ally go in there.

1. Cre­ate A New Smart Playlist

   Go to File > New Smart Playl­ist or press Ctrl+Alt+N. This will be dif­fer­ent on a Mac.

2. “Play Count is 0″

   Using the first drop-down box, select Play Count. Make sure is and 0 fol­low in the drop-down and text box after it.

3. Avoid Pod­casts

   If you want to avoid includ­ing pod­casts, like I do, cre­ate a new rule by press­ing the + but­ton, right of the rule you just cre­ated. This time set the drop-down box to Pod­cast and the second to is false.

4. More Options

   If you only want a cer­tain num­ber of tracks in the playl­ist at any one time, you can use the option boxes under the rule list. It can be ran­dom or sequential.

5. Nam­ing

   After hit­ting OK, you can rename it. I just called it Unplayed.

Check out more Smart Playl­ist ideas at Life­hacker.