auto-update of playlists

[jerseyfreeze]

I've never really used playlists, but this past week I started fooling around with them. I'd also always just manually updated my iPod. So this morning I looked at some of the update settings and selected "automatically update these playlists." As soon as I selected "ok", my iPod was updated and now I only have 137 songs instead of the 1000+ that i had before. Did I do something wrong or does this mean that manually updating playlists deletes everything except what's contained in those lists?

I was asssuming that my entire library would remain on the iPod, but just the playlists would be updated each time I plugged the iPod into my Mac.

Help!

-Jason

[eustacescrubb]

Yeah, "Update selected playlists" means that iTunes will delete anything not in the playlists.

[jerseyfreeze]

hmmm... well, that's disappointing.

Thanks for the info, though, -e.

-Jason

[zerock]

for people that have a full ipod its not..it allows the user to take the music they want to listen at that time.

[supperman]

These people you speak about should just get a bigger iPod. What's the point of having a harddive base music player if you only carry a sub-set of music around with you? And if you have to keep changing your playlist, you might as well do it manually.

I'm really disappointed with this because I was hoping to use playlist auto-update to add only the new songs, and so I can clear out all the mp3s I've got on my powerbook and store them only on my iPod. I've been doing it manually, but the auto-update would have been much more convenient.

[eustacescrubb]

supperman,

(Great username!) Please try to be less judgemental when you post here. Not everyone can afford a new iPod, and not everyone sees things the way you do. Or, in my case, Apple doesn't make an iPod big enough to hold all of my music. The 30 GB would hold about half of what I have, and I know users with twice as much music as I have.

That said, there is a solution to your problem. Make a playlist and add to it everything currently on your iPod. Once you're sure your iPod and the playist have the same tracks, conect your iPod, and set it to update only selected playlists - and select just that new playlist you've made.
From then on, when you import new tracks, put them in that playlist, and then when you sync your iPod, iTunes will add the new tracks.

[jameso]

What u do is make a smart playlist with the following settings

Limit to XX gigs (the size of your iPod minus a gig or so) selected by Random (or what ever u want, most people should properly use most recently played)
Match only checked songs, so u can disable songs in your library and have them not show up on your iPod
Live Updating on

Then get the iPod to sync with that list.

I also added the "name can not contain stairway to heaven" and must be longer than 30 seconds but that was for personal reasons

Hope this helps

Also on the comment that people should have got a bigger iPod, money aside i got the 15 gig because it came with the dock and didn't have the extra weight of the 30 gig, which is a big factor for me. The ability to have half my list selected at random is useful to say the least because i was about to go through and copy the best 13.4 gigs, that would had been dull and taken all the spark out of my new purchase

James O'Farrell