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Playlists are a great way to organize your music and your ophthalmology audio flashcards. However, they take a fair amount of work to create and maintain. For example, let’s say you have a slow Sunday afternoon, and want to listen to only high-yield flashcards containing these topics:

Phacomatosis
Corneal dystrophies
White dot syndromes
HLA associations

With a regular playlist, you have to create the list, then manually search through your collection of keywords for each topic and manually drag the files into the list.

It’s not THAT hard, but smart playlists make this task even easier. For example, you can create a smart playlist that has RULES, that say to include questions with ANY of the following keywords:

phacomatosis, corneal dystrophy, white dot, HLA

Now, EVERY file that has those terms in the editable id3 tags will be automatically sucked into that playlist, and depending upon your configutation of your portable iPod, into the player’s smartplaylist. This is very useful if you make your own flashcards as they instantly populate the proper smartlist.

This doesn’t seem that useful!
No … well, how about this. In order to keep my music separated from my flashcards, I have a smart playlist called “just music” with the rule: Include all music files without the term “rootatlas.com” in the album artist

Now, all of my regular music populates this folder and the flashcards stay out. When I rip my CD collection, I don’t have to remember to copy the new files into my “just music” playlist, as the smartlist automatically adds the songs.

Still not impressed?
Ok, how about this: many flashcards are relevant to several subspecialties. Congenital glaucoma, for example, can grouped into both glaucoma and pediatrics. So, I’ve set up my Pediatrics smart list to include everything from my pediatrics album (the stuff I recorded when reading the pediatrics books).

In addition, I’ve constructed the smartlist to pull in any flashcards with the keywords like pediatrics, kids, children, congenital, baby, neonate, or neonatal. Now, all my pediatric retinal syndromes get sucked in as do all the juvenile uveitis topics!

In fact, I listen to my flashcards entirely from smart playlists I’ve created for each subspecialty. To get an idea how you might want to set up your own smart lists, click here.

In Conclusion:
Smart playlists are very useful when organizing your audio flashcards. They become even more important when using the “star rating” system of organization, letting you organize your cards without need of a computer! You can read more about the star system here.