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Many people with an iPod never bother to create playlists … just dragging all their music onto the device and shuffling through them randomly.

Unfortunately, this method of mass file transfer doesn’t work well with our flashcards, as your music and questions will mix together. Nobody wants to hear about phacomatosis right in the middle of a Pink Floyd marathon!

Playlists are great because they allow you to separate your music files into collections, such as “just music” or “all my flashcards.” To create a playlist within iTunes, go to “File – New Playlist” and name it.

Then, select all the files you want in your playlist and drag them into the folder.

You can be highly selective in your playlists. iTunes search function allows you to easily look up a topic (like cornea, inheritance patterns) and drag the results into a your custom playlist. For example, you could make playlists on:

• Subspecialty (Retina, cornea, glaucoma, plastics)
• High Yield Topics (phacomatosis, white dot syndromes, studies and trials)
• Difficult Questions (gene associations)
• Weird Syndromes

I personally like to create a playlist for each subspecialty, as this is an easy way to playback the files on my iPod. Subspecialty playlists are nice because you can syncronize them with your own studies. Plus, breaking your questions into smaller increments allows you to work through a manageble number at a time.

Once you’ve got the idea of playlist creation down, you might want to seriously consider creating your own “smartlists” which are even more useful!