Nano and Bigger Library

[sno_cat219]

I have a little less than 4 gb of music on my itunes right now, but im sure im going to add more. If i were to get the nano, does it auto fill like the shuffle if it can't hold all of iTunes music library?

[Tammy05]

You can manually add the songs you want. Or do autofill. Your choice.

[dimmer]

Don't think you can do an autofill like the shuffle, where you just tell it to go ahead and choose for you. However you can use a smart playlist to do this anyway (for example tell it to choose songs at random, and limit it to 4 GB or whatever is needed to fill a nano), and then tell the nano to synch to this playlist.

[sno_cat219]

What would you make the rules be?

[Erudite.Warrior]

Originally posted by sno_cat219
What would you make the rules be?

My current Nano Smart Playlists

Playlist Named "Nano"
Playlist is NOT "Not Music" (Not Music is Playlist with just that, everything that is NOT music.
My Rating is Greater Than "Two Stars"

Playlist Named "Rate These"
My Rating IS "Blank"
Limit to 25 Songs, selected by "Random"
This playlist gives me 25 songs to rate which I can typically do in a day. Enable Live Updating and it refills each time the Nano is connected

All Podcasts are loaded

All Audiobooks are loaded.

The way I define my ratings is the following:
No stars = unrated
One star = Hate it
Two Stars = Don't Like it
Three Stars = Like it
Four Stars = Really Like it
Five Stars = Love it

My Nano is set to only update checked songs, while my 60GB iPod Photo synchs everything.

To create a playlist of only Unchecked Songs do the following:

1. Create a Smart Playlist called "Checked".
Time is GREATER THAN 0:00
Select "Match Only Checked Songs"

2. Create a Smart Playlist called "Unchecked"
Playlist is NOT "Checked"

There are an infinite number of ways to set up your smart playlists this only one way. Hopefully it will give you some ideas.

[ipodphoto30]

you may manual sync or autosync

[dimmer]

Simplest to give shufflelike behaviour would be to just
1. create a new smart playlist,
2. uncheck "Match the following rule:"
3. choose: Limit to 4 GB selected by Random
4. uncheck "Match only checked songs"
5. check "Live Updating"

Now when you want a change of songs on the iPod just delete all the songs out of the playlist and it will automatically fill up with new songs. Make sure the iPod is set to synch automatically to this playlist.

If you want songs to move off the ipod after you listen to them and for the playlist to automatically change itself slowly you could in addition to the above
1. check the "Match the following rule"
2. choose Last Played is not in the last 1 day

After this you can just keep on adding in conditions - eg limit tracks to 4 or 5 stars rating, or just of a particular genre.

I myself manually pick 3 GB of tracks (usually new music I want to listen to or old favs that must be on the iPod or I wilt and die), then let iTunes randomly pick the remaining 1GB (with the provision that tracks it selects are not on the handpicked playlist). This gives me variety and mixes up my music listening a bit. The nano is then set to synch to both the handpicked and itunes picked playlists.

Hope that gives a few more ideas on how to do this - once you get the hang of smart playlists they are very useful and quite a bit of fun.

[cjt]

Thanks Dimmer! I feel stupid now... I couldn't figure out how to keep certain songs on my new nano, and then randomly fill the rest - all I had to do is sync from 2 different playlists! Thanks a lot for the help - even if I do feel stupid now!

[goldcoaster]

my 4gig Nano pops up with a box , something like, " you have too much music, do you want itunes to select songs to fill the ipod" so I am guessing it has a random fill function.


- GoldCoaster