1) Music (Media Kind = Music)
2) Sorts by Most Recently Added
and
3) Groups by Albums alphabetically

Therefore, if I add two or more albums at one time and the songs go in out of order, my smart playlist will keep them sorted by album in iTunes.

I have chosen to put use place holder years for songs where I do not yet have the year info. You can choose an appropriate number -3333- for all songs missing their year info for a given decade. Then use that to pull in those songs. Due to the limits of iTunes smart playlists boolean rules you will probably have to use nested smart playlists to achieve what you are trying to do.

Another option is to break down your genre groups by decade:

popular music 1930-1939
popular music 1940-1949

I too thought originally that the … addition to the smart playlist was allowing us to added boolean tests to the previous test. That is what I hoped any way. ;-) This change last year is of some limited use to me but the nestsed tests would be much more powerful I believe. Now I generally create a number of smart play lists and then create additional more sophisticated collections by pulling from collections of them.

Can anyone tell me how to configure a smart play list so that it randomizes the tracks by using the artist as the primary key.

I will give you an example of what I am talking about.
I have a smart playlist that pulls in everything by genre. So lets say ‘pop’ as an example.

The problem that I have is even if I have a total of say 100 tracks and I limit it to say 20 tracks by the limit check box in the smart play list; there are artists that seem to appear alot more often than others. This by the way makes sense to me because I have artists with many albums against them and then some artists may only have one album.

So what I am trying to do is the following:

If I have a total of 20 artists in my playlist and the total tracks across all of them and their albums is say 1000. If i create a smart playlist of 20 tracks I would like each artist to have one song before it starts repeating the artists from the top down again.

Thanks

Match any of the following rules:
Year is in the range 1930 to 1939
Album contains 30s

This works fine, but some of the songs on the albums with 30s in the title are from the 1940s, so after ‘Album contains 30s’ I click on ‘…’ and add

Year is in the range 1930 to 1939

This, I thought, should exclude those songs not from the 1930s that are on albums with 30s in the title, but it doesn’t make a difference to the playlist, and

Year is less than 1940

includes all the songs in my whole iTunes library for which the year is unknown.

I want all songs from 1930-1939, plus albums with ’30s’ in the title, minus songs on those albums outside the range 1930-1939. Maybe it would help if there were to option to exclude songs not in the range 1930-1939, but there isn’t. Can anyone help, please?