Introduction

Apples iTunes is one of the most successful music player applications in the current computer history. This application changed the way people organize and listen to their music since it is one of the first music player applications which used the meta data inside the music files quite extensively. This system inspired a lot of different software vendors to follow the same path and that is likely to be one reason why the term meta data became so much more popular lately.
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Playlists

A basic part in the daily music experience is the order of tracks the users listen to. The order of tracks is normally collected in so called playlists. These are generally linear lists of a music collection which are generated by the user. There are basically only two ways on he/she can listen to the music inside playlist–linear or shuffled. The amount and the kind of playlists vary from user to user since the choice of playlist is for example influenced by the musical taste, current mood, amount of music files, characteristics of the user, etc… . Since playlist are an important part in the daily music experience it is safe to assume that playlist have a personal value for the music consumer. Playlist are normally generated manually and thus took the user some time to create them. Playlist are not the kind of digital information/collection the user would easily throw away or can easily be recreated. Playlists are mostly created thoroughly and as mentioned earlier have a personal value.
This fact makes dealing with playlist rather static and clumsy. But there are several scenarios where people would like to interact in the linear and static field of playlist:

1. My computer should go to sleep after the last track from Pink Floyd.
2. When the music gets faster on my party playlist the visualizer should change
3. The computer should change the playlist automatically when this playlist is over
4. …

There is a need for interrupting the static behavior of playlist with actions defined by the user.
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Smart Tracks

Smart Tracks are items which can be manually inserted at any point inside the static playlist. They behave exactly like standard audiofiles in this list namely when the iTunes application hits the smart track in the playlist order the track gets played/executed. But what makes a smart track smart? Smart tracks are similar to smart playlist-semantically descriptive actions. These tracks allow the user to define an action on what should happen when the track get hit by iTunes.
Smart tracks are based on AppleScript and thus can be easily extended/modified by the users demands. There is also the option to connect an Automator workflow with a smart track, which allows the user to define actions which includes applications outside from iTunes. For example: “When this track gets played pause this playlist for 7:13 minutes and open the WindowsMediaPlayer with the Kylie Minogue music video in fullscreen. When the 7:13 minutes are over quit WindowsMediaPlayer again and start the iTunes Visualizer.”
Predefined actions like Smart Tracks let the user enjoy/focus on the music itself instead of interrupting the music experience for controlling and commanding the iTunes music application. This could have a great impact on setting the computer yet another step into the background and the users goals into the foreground.
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