The checklist seems endless when getting ready for a holiday road trip. Is the house secured? Animals taken care of? Gifts ready to go?

But when I’m staring down 8 hours of highway, I have additional preparations that must be attended to. Is the iPod charged? Did I download a new book to listen to? Should I buy some music?

Buying music in a hurry is hard for me. Generally speaking, the process of searching for, previewing, deciding, then building a custom album is as much entertainment as listening to the songs themselves. I’m not accustomed to rushing through this chain of events. By doing so, I don’t feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.

But trying to get ready for a road trip demands desperate measures. Like Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, preparations must be made, and they must be made quickly. (Although my briefcase doesn’t look anything like his inside.)

I decided to give iTunes Essentials a spin. If you haven’t looked into it, it’s a relatively new feature where Apple music buffs have assembled playlists based on themes, such as “Acoustic Rock Collection,” that are ready for your listening enjoyment. If you don’t already have any of the Essentials songs in your music library, then you can download the entire bunch just like an album.

I tried two of the Essentials collections, and thought the selections were darn good. It was like listening to a radio DJ in a good grove spinning one great track after another. The thing that surprised me, however, is that iTunes didn’t add any new information to the song’s metadata to make it easy to reassemble the songs into a playlist. For some reason I thought I would see something like “Classic hip-Hop” in one of the info fields such as Grouping.

So in order to reassemble the list, I changed my View Options to show the “Date Added” column, then I could click on the arrow in the column header to display the most recent songs added to my library. Then I created a custom playlist by the same name of the Essentials collection and dragged the songs over to it.

All in all, this method worked pretty good. But it left me wondering if there’s an easier way to manage new iTunes music, especially when I’m in a hurry. If you have any tips, I’d really like to hear them.

Bottom line, I was happy to have new tracks to listen to while rolling down the highway. Between the two Essentials collections I downloaded, and the Audible book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, I enjoyed my travels more than I would have otherwise.

I’m looking for some tips to help me manage new music more quickly, such as when I’m getting ready for a road trip.