Comments on: Tips and How-To’s: iPhone Music Management

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:48:06 +0000

If you use either 'Last played is not in X days' or check the 'limit to X songs by least recently played' box Songs will drop off smart playlists as you listen to them. When you sync your iPhone you will only need to add as many songs as you listened to from the last sync, not update the entire list.

I use a playlist for my podcasts with the rule 'playcount is less than 1', after I listen to them the re removed at the next sync. There was a bug that prevented playlists with the rule 'podcast = true' from live updating. I don't know if its been fixed since I have made my playlists to work around it.

Currently I keep all my 3 stars or more tracks on my iPhone and have a playlist 'Last played is not in the last month' and 'limit to 3gb by random' for my two star tracks. (I use 1 star for music I haven't rated yet).

Every time I plug in my iPhone listened to podcasts are removed, new podcasts are added, and 2 star songs that I have listened to are replaced with fresh ones. I always have my favorite 1500 songs and another 1000 or so that I like on my iPhone.

The only downside is I don't have access to every deep cut I own at all times. [Grandpa] Back when I was a kid if we wanted to carry 4000 songs we needed to haul a backpack full of CDs and something to play them on. [/grandpa]

By: John V. Keogh

John V. Keogh — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:34:30 +0000

duh - stars used for formatting eh, that should read

What I do is have my faves 4 and 5 star songs on the iPhone all the time and rotate a few least recently played 3 star, and least recently played 2 star songs (in smart playlists), which I will delete later if I rate them as 1 star while on the road. I also have a few unrated songs in a smart playlist so I can rate them on the phone.

By: John V. Keogh

John V. Keogh — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:30:03 +0000

The iPhone certainly can update play count and time and sync this to iTunes. I use iScrobbler to send this data to last.fm. So far 58502 tracks played – can you tell what it is I like yet? http://www.last.fm/user/jovike

What I do is have my faves * and *** songs on the iPhone all the time and rotate a few least recently played ** and least recently played ** songs (in smart playlists) which I will delete later if I rate them as * while on the road.

By: Seatown

Seatown — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:27:53 +0000

At first I thought this was a great idea, and set it up to synch a random playlist of 3 gb of music rated 3 stars and up. Then I realized that now it’s going to have to copy 3 gb worth of data each time I synch! And I thought it took a long time to synch before…!! Am I missing something here?

By: Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:14:08 +0000

@steve

simplify media is great but it streaming direct from itunes. Aside from issues with playing over the net vs having physical file on your iphone, its a great way to access your entire library

By: Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:54:10 +0000

@steve jobs

loving my Bold. my old iphone still working well for Tris, etc.

By: Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:53:25 +0000

I still say this is useless.

I have to play or rate songs not on my iPhone so the smart playlist can pick up on it and some day move it to my iphone? Unless you are rating new songs all the time, its not going to give you 100 new songs that rotate. And if you are rating new songs, just move those into new playlists.

Here's an equally useless idea: have 10 playlists each with 16gb of music on it and sync a different one every day.

epic fail

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:37:02 +0000

@ethan:

Do these streaming apps, like Simplify Media and OrbLive require moving (or copying) your media into their desktop applications, or can just you keep everything in iTunes?

By: ethan

ethan — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:58:10 +0000

Use Simplify Media or Orb Live to stream all your music/media to your phone from your computer. It works great.

By: WatersWest

WatersWest — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:44:37 +0000

One of the great features of the iPod Shuffle is Auto-Fill. For those of you unfamiliar with this, iTunes basically can randomly re-fill your Shuffle whenever you tell it to, either from the whole library or from a playlist.

It's really too bad they don't make this feature available to both the Nano and the iPhone. I imagine it would be put to good use if if it was.