It would be really cool to be able to organize playlists into folders in the interface. It seems so intuitive that I spent quite a bit of time searching the web for how to do it, thinking surely there must be a way and I just don’t know about it yet. Looks like that is sadly not the case… sniffle… wail… how can I find the strength to go on?!?

Pull yourself together, man. We’ve got to keep up appearances for the children.

I do make use of a few naming tricks to keep the playlists in some sort of meaningful order. For example, putting the underscore _ character at the beginning of a playlist name will take it to the top of the heap. Other special characters have hierarchical relationships to each other, too, so you can get creative and play with symbols like @, -, (, ), and so on to manifest a structure for your playlists. I also use blank playlists as “separators” to keep playlist “sections” separate, e.g. a playlist of all underscores marks the boundary between the Smart Playlists and my manually created playlists.

It’s kind of a fun hack, but it would be much easier if I could just drop a collection of related playlists into a folder I could close at will to free up some screen real estate and switch more easily between playlists. Maybe in iTunes 5? Do you think Steve Jobs knows how much he wishes he read my blog?