Make itunes fill up my ipod!

November 24, 2006 2:02 PM

How do I tell itunes to just do it's best at filling up my ipod?

I have a 1 GB ipod nano, and my music collection is much larger than that. What I want to be able to do is to have a playlist like 'my top rated' and then another playlist with the rest of my music assigned to take up whatever remaining space is left on the ipod.

The other thing I want to happen is for this second playlist (the bulk of music playlist) needs to update when I add new music. That is a more general question really, how do I make smart playlists recalculate? They seem so nice when you make them, but they don't ever seem to update correctly.

posted by cschneid to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

The easiest way, I think, to do it is to make the second playlist not simply be random, but to incorporate something that makes it update. Something like "take n MB of music, selected randomly, that hasn't been played in the last 24 hours." (And be sure you've checked live updating.)

As for your first question, smart lists can easily fill up to a maximum size; just figure out what size you need it to be (probably by syncing the top-rated playlist to it and then seeing how much space is left) and make that the max.
posted by raf at 2:06 PM on November 24, 2006

Make your second playlist a smart playlist, like raf says, but in addition to limiting it to songs "not played in X number of hours/days", also be sure to add the rule that songs not be "skipped in the last X number of hours/days" otherwise songs you find yourself always skipping over will never get replaced with fresh stuff.
posted by Robot Johnny at 2:11 PM on November 24, 2006

Response by poster: Thank you for this, but I want this to be easier. I was already at the point where I was deleting and recreating auto-playlists.

What I really want is an option in the limit to area that is ipod specific, that simply says 'limit to how much space is left'.
posted by cschneid at 2:40 PM on November 24, 2006

If you try to put a playlist bigger than the free space on the iPod then it will just fill the iPod then stop.
posted by chrispy108 at 2:48 PM on November 24, 2006

Use iPod Filler.
posted by niles at 3:24 PM on November 24, 2006

I was already at the point where I was deleting and recreating auto-playlists.

You are checking the 'Live updating' box when you set up the smart playlists, aren't you? If you do they always update (on a Mac anyway), and as chrispy108 says, iTunes will just add songs until it runs out of space.
posted by jack_mo at 4:52 PM on November 24, 2006

Mine just said "too many songs, would you like me to make a selection?" I said yes and the damn thing scrambled up all the playlists I already had and kept all the duplicate songs that I would've expected it to remove first.
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:18 PM on November 24, 2006

Best answer: I did this for a while: 40% of the iPod got 5 star songs; 35% of the iPod got 4 star songs; 25% got 3 star songs. You create 3 playlists. Say you have a 10gb iPod. So you convert those percentages to absolutes in your brain: creating 4GB, 3.5GB, and 2.5GB max size playlists. These are smart playlists. You want a new random bunch? Just select-all in each playlist and delete. Smart playlist immediately refills itself with a new random bunch.
posted by umlaut at 10:31 PM on November 24, 2006

Forgot to explain the entire point: this is so that the better rating of song, the higher probability that it will be on your iPod. Quality skews it away from complete randomness.
posted by umlaut at 10:33 PM on November 24, 2006

Response by poster: umlaut: thank you, thats very nearly what I was looking for. I didn't know the delete-all trick. That makes everything much easier for me. Thanks.

Thank you everyone else as well, this has helped.
posted by cschneid at 10:29 AM on November 28, 2006