Folders, which have been a feature of iTunes since iTunes 5.0, serve as a means to better organize your music. For example, you could create genre- or artist-based folders with corresponding playlists nested within them. But moving playlists into folders isn't the most fun thing, and can be especially time consuming if you're going to be moving a bunch. Fortunately, the "Move Playlists to Folder" script provides a means for you to easily move multiple playlists over to a specified folder in iTunes.

First, download and install the script: the file should reside in your [username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder. After successful installation, the script will now appear as an item in the scripts menu. If you didn't already have any scripts installed, the script menu allows you to access and run scripts for a specific app.

This AppleScript, along with a host of many other iTunes script goodies, is available as a free download at Doug's Scripts. However, Doug would also be more than happy if you were generous enough to donate a buck or two to help buy him a latte.

If you're anything like me -- and I sincerely hope you're not, for your sake -- you have a large iTunes music library, but the music that you like right now is only a small fraction of that total. (Yeah, that embarrassing '96 Dave Matthews Band album is getting pretty dusty.)

Since my musical tastes vary from day to day, and songs quickly fall in and out of my fickle favor, I love assigning ratings to the music I like this minute. I have a five-star rating for la crème de la crème, and a four-star rating for stuff that's pretty good. Three-star items are sadly relegated to history.

Next, I combine ratings with smart playlists: Now I can add and remove songs from my current rotation just by changing their star rating. I can do this on-the-go, too: Change a rating on my iPod, and the playlists are updated immediately, and eventually synced back to the computer.

Follow me across the jump to see how you can dynamically and efficiently manage your music as quickly as your tastes change.

An anonymous tipster sent us a short video showing new capabilities of the iPhone 2.0 software. It's a little hard to see around his building's attractive fluorescent lighting, but hopefully you get the gist.

It appears that videos will be easily playable in portrait or landscape orientations, using data from the iPhone's accelerometer. (Though it's been possible to play embedded QuickTime videos through Safari in the vertical orientation since firmware version 1.1.1.)

Also, mercifully, it looks like video playlists are in our future.

Update: The video has been updated with a far less glarey version. Thanks, anonymous tipster friend!

TUAW reader Jamie Phelps has possibly stumbled upon a nasty iPhone synching bug when keeping one's iTunes library on an external hard drive. While tips like our how-tos for setting up iTunes with external drives or even an AirPort Disk work pretty well even when synching iPods with them, Jamie found that his iPhone gets the brainwash treatment when he's away from the drive containing his external iTunes library. As the story goes, Jamie synched his iPhone with a few songs and playlists, made a couple new playlists and then synched again. Hitting the road, however, and getting away from his external iTunes library drive is when the bug rears its nasty head: plugging the iPhone in while on the go caused iTunes to wipe out the new playlists and songs from the second sync operation, basically reverting them to their state before the second sync. To verify, Jamie even got adventurous and tried this whole thing a second time, once again watching iTunes blow away changes from the previous iPhone sync when the external media library isn't mounted.

This is the first time I've heard of iTunes handling this kind of setup in a poor way; for as long as I can remember, iTunes has been clever enough to realize what's happening and and would either not sync anything to an iPod when away from the library drive, or it would actually sync any media downloaded or imported while away (as we've mentioned before, you can use the Advanced > Consolidate Library command to move all this new media once reconnected with the library drive). Since we don't really have any evidence of Apple deliberately changing this behavior for their iPods or iPhones, it makes sense for this quirk to be classified as a bug that will hopefully be squashed with an inevitable iPhone software update. But what say you, TUAW readers? Anyone else get bit? Sound off.

The Ocala Star-Banner has an interesting story involving an 'iPod exchange,' where two of their reporters decided to swap iPod shuffles for a few days to get a taste for each others' musical interests. The key to their experiment, at least in their eyes, is the fact that they specifically used shuffles, so neither could scan through the library on the iPod or even tell what songs they were listening to; it was literally more about the experience of what music the iPod would serve up, rather than skimming through a simple list of artists and songs with which one could pass a musical judgement.

I'll save the dramatic results for your own reading, but the concept is an interesting one: in a world where we increasingly are keeping more and more - or perhaps the entirety -of our music libraries in our pocket, what would happen if you temporarily traded your collection with a friend, co-worker or that guy you just can't meet eye-to-eye with on [insert band here]? Could you gain a musical appreciation for your iPod exchangee? Or would you scratch them off your listening party list forever?

This isn't the most advanced tip in the book, but I found the trick darn handy last night while performing some badly needed library cleanup. In iTunes, you can open a second window for almost any item in your sources list on the left - the iTunes Store, a playlist or - interestingly - even a folder of playlists. While your library items such as Music, Movies and TV Shows are unfortunately exempt from this convenience, you can simply double-click any of these items to open them in their own window, minus a source list of their own. This is great for having easy access to playing music in one window while you work in another, perhaps cleaning up files, like I was, shopping at the store, or building a new playlist.

Just in time for a new fall semester, the iTMS has introduced a Back to School (iTMS link) section, offering playlists based on the many cultures, cliques and stereotypes that (love it or hate it) exist and collide on so many college campuses across our great planet. Groups like Hipsters, Hippies, Greeks, the Honor Roll, Club Kids, The Faithful and even Cowboys (and more) all are represented, with playlists ranging in price from around $25-$45 USD.

If you ever needed a stereotyping microscope to peer into what these hooligan cliques are into these days, or if you're looking for a way into said cliques, these Back to School lists might just be the ticket.

While browsing Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes and Smart Playlists.com last night for some ideas on how to make iTunes do my bidding, it dawned on me that these handy tools of automated music wrangling might make for a great Ask TUAW discussion. After all: who doesn't love music, and who doesn't love sharing their tips for better working (or music listening) bliss?

So what say you, TUAW readers? Do you have a smart playlist and a killer rating system for the perfect party soundtrack? Or perhaps a smart playlist that helps you keep track of which music you need to burn and back up? Feel free to lay it on us and share your smart playlist ninja skills with the rest of the class.

iPod.iTunes offers 8 different ways of synchronizing your iTunes library and playlists between both devices, giving you powerful control over what files are moved where and how. All formats are supported, including MP3, AAC, protected AAC (iTMS purchases), Audible books, and video files. PC-formatted iPods are compatible, and all metadata such as your song ratings, play count and album art are preserved in the transfer. This is a great utility for anyone in need of an easy method to clone an iPod, keep iTunes libraries on different Macs in sync or simply back up your iPod's library if it's the only place you keep all your media (Apple sadly doesn't provide a way of doing this).

Check out the full list of features of everything iPod.iTunes is capable of. Another handy trick this app performs is that it can live and run directly from your iPod, in which case your registration ($35 USD) travels with you. A demo is available from crispSofties.

A MacOSXHints reader has put together an interesting set of Quicksilver scripts that will allow you to both easily tag your iTunes music as it is playing, and create on-the-fly playlists based on these tags. The way they work is simple: while music is playing in iTunes, you can use Quicksilver's text abilities to easily add tags to the music file's comments section. The beauty here is that tags are prefixed with an asterisk (*), and they are appended to anything that might already be in the song's comments field, preserving what you might already have added. The second script allows you to create an iTunes playlist right from Quicksilver based on any of your tags.

I haven't gotten to test these out yet, but the download includes detailed instructions from the author's site.