I no longer have an OS X box, but I do have iTunes installed on my Windows machines in support of various pocketable devices of Cupertinian provenance.
I've never actually tried using iTunes as a music player, so I didn't know about the capability you describe, and I appreciate you pointing it out to me.
Unfortunately, it doesn't sound as though it would satisfy my requirement; while I can see some use in an automatically updated playlist consisting of tracks from the playlists I designate, almost all of my (near 100GB) music library consists of pieces which are broken up into a single track per movement. This being the case, it doesn't sound like a smart playlist would solve the "shuffle" problem of jumping from (e.g.) one piece's third movement to another piece's second, any more than any other sort of playlist does.
If I can define a smart playlist whose members are other playlists, of course, that's a different matter, and I'll have to take a look and see whether I actually can do that. It doesn't seem too likely, though; as I said elsewhere, I'm not sure why the idea of a playlist containing other playlists is so apparently strange to music player implementers, but I've yet to find anything with the capability. (I'm not sure whether they're afraid of graph cycles, but I'm also not sure whether those would actually pose a problem, and even if they did, it shouldn't be too hard to exclude them by checking at "add to playlist" time and refusing to complete the task if it would create a cycle in the graph.)
I've never actually tried using iTunes as a music player, so I didn't know about the capability you describe, and I appreciate you pointing it out to me.
Unfortunately, it doesn't sound as though it would satisfy my requirement; while I can see some use in an automatically updated playlist consisting of tracks from the playlists I designate, almost all of my (near 100GB) music library consists of pieces which are broken up into a single track per movement. This being the case, it doesn't sound like a smart playlist would solve the "shuffle" problem of jumping from (e.g.) one piece's third movement to another piece's second, any more than any other sort of playlist does.
If I can define a smart playlist whose members are other playlists, of course, that's a different matter, and I'll have to take a look and see whether I actually can do that. It doesn't seem too likely, though; as I said elsewhere, I'm not sure why the idea of a playlist containing other playlists is so apparently strange to music player implementers, but I've yet to find anything with the capability. (I'm not sure whether they're afraid of graph cycles, but I'm also not sure whether those would actually pose a problem, and even if they did, it shouldn't be too hard to exclude them by checking at "add to playlist" time and refusing to complete the task if it would create a cycle in the graph.)