iTunes 201: Using smart playlists to fill your portable's music library

There's many ways of sortering, I find rating all songs too much a bother, there my system is quite much simpler.

I'm using the metatag for BPM. For albums I want to be synced with my iPod Touch, I simply tag "1" in the BPM-field. (You could also use "Grouping", or "Comments").

A smart playlist sorts out all songs tagged "1". My iPod is set to sync with this.

I tagged the whole library, then removed the tag from just enough albums to fit my the smart playlist onto my 32GB iPod.

With a library of over 13,000 songs, Smart Playlists and I have become quite close.

I use smart playlists to sync my iPhone 3G. I got one playlist (and had others before) that won't sync to the phone even when there is plenty of space on the phone. I got a playlist that shows me mixes over 30 mins long (these are mixes from A state of trance, if anyone has heard of it). Thing is, when I search on the phone for these mixes, they show up, they are there but the playlist won't copy. Any ideas? I tried recreating the playlist with different names which worked on other playlists but it's not doing it for this one. Thanks.

So, maybe someone here can help me with a little music problem. I'm a big discography collector, but with some bands that means I have multiple nearly identical copies of the same song, for example my library has 5 different versions of Journey's Don't Stop Believin' from different albums. Any suggestions on how to keep my iPod from syncing multiple copies like that which still let me keep my full albums intact?

I created a smart playlist that constantly rotates a selection of my favorites onto my iphone so that I can have new music on my iphone every day (or at least every time I sync).

I do that by building a smart playlist based on my Favorites and Recently Added lists. My smart list only includes music from those lists that I haven't played in the last 4 months and I haven't skipped in the last 4 months and then randomly limits that to a particular size that will fit on my iphone.

This allows me to have a smaller set of my favorite and new music that changes everytime I sync and also temporarily removes any music that I've skipped or heard recently.

smart/regular playlists are the key to successful management of large libraries.

I have smart playlists for each year 2000 to present and 1 each for decades 70s+older, 80s, 90s and 00s for quick access to a given time period.
all new music goes into a smart playlist for content examination; let's face it, there is rarely an album where one wants to listen to 100% of its tracks. tracks I really like get put in general "like" list and then further filtered into "mood" playlists or even a "like2009" or "like2010" playlists.

I have a smart playlist for each device (8GB Nano for the car, my 16GB iPhone, etc) where each playlist contains other playlists (mood, like, year, etc...)

yeah, it was a pain to initially set up but i am much happier for it now and the ease of management now was worth the initial setup pain.

I have dozens of Smart Playlists like this, I have them roughly filtered by rating: 4 stars, 5 stars, 4&5 stars; then sublists of stuff I've not listened to in 1 month, 2 months, 3 months and so on. I also have lists for length of song because sometimes I just want short snappy numbers. Been doing it for years, I just wish there was a way to do on the fly sub-filtering of them, kind of like search in the finder where you can add criteria and it does it on the fly and you can then save it or not.

For my nano, I've always been frustrated by the lack of randomness when I shuffle songs. One way I found to combat this is to have a shuffle playlist of 4+ star songs that specifically excludes my "recently played" playlist (in addition to excluding songs that don't shuffle well). The real shame about setting the "ignore when shuffling" option is that you can't easily display which songs have this set in the main view, you can only see it on a song-by-song basis.

Is there a way to split your actual iTunes library across a couple of drives? My internal hard drive on my Mac pro is getting so full I can't even download patches. I'd like to move most of my iTunes directory to my USB back up drive but leave some items on my Mac for playing when I'm on the road.

I'm a big album listener; I want a random mix on my iPod, but I want the entire album to be available to me. I also don't want to limit my listening to only 4 or 5 star songs;my collection is large enough that I want to revisit albums. As such, I was very happy when Apple expanded the auto-fill feature of the Nano to the rest of the line. It was much to my dismay that you could not tell it to randomly grab complete albums. So, I set to it with an AppleScript. My script asks a target size to fill and will then randomly grab complete albums from my Music Only/non-Christmas playlist. I even set it so I can choose a few artists that will be guaranteed to be on the list; I couldn't leave home without some Pink Floyd or Low available. Once its done, I just grab the playlist and copy it over to my iPod.