Month: September 2009

Itunes sync of smart playlist podcasts update

I now have my itunes syncing unheard podcasts into a smart playlist – my smart playlist is no longer empty on my ipod. Although I didn’t get a direct answer from a variety of places, Thanks go to GotKnowHow that gave me the final key to getting things to work.
I had to do the following:-

  1. I ended up deleting all of my old podcasts (that has given me a lot of disk space back).
  2. Created/modified my smart playlist called Unheard Podcasts to ensure I have the following set –
    • Playcount is less than 1
    • Kind is MPEG audio file (removes video)
    • Genre is podcast
    • Live updating is on
    • Smart playlist for unheard podcasts in iTunes 9 (by absoblogginlutely)

  3. I selected my ipod in itunes, then the podcasts tab and unchecked “automatically include all unplayed episodes of all podcasts”.
  4. Down the bottom of the screen under “include episodes from playlists” I made sure my “Unheard Podcasts” playlist was selected. Fixing iTunes smart playlist to include my podcasts. (by absoblogginlutely)

After a sync it all seemed to work.
I’m not sure what the final step was, but this combination seems to work.

iTunes 9 = empty smart playlists on portable devices

I upgraded Itunes to version 9 last week, synchronised my ipod nano, took it to the office and found no music in my “unheard podcasts” playlist. This is a playlist that consists of podcasts with a play count <1 and that are of type audio so it doesn’t try to sync the unwatched video podcasts.

It turns out that this seems to be a bug and all “smart” playlists can be blank on portable devices.  Thankfully it is easy to tell if you are affected – just create a smart playlist with content, sync it to your device and then look in itunes under the smart playlist for the device to see if it is empty.

There is an update to Itunes 9.01 – although this hasn’t fixed the issue – I see that they didn’t rename the playlists feature to “stupid playlists”. The other work around of turning of the liveupdate function in the playlist setting didn’t work for me either.

For those of you who are wondering why I even have this playlist, it’s so that I have all the unheard podcasts in one location so when driving it will automatically switch to the next podcast (or I can skip to the next one). If I use the podcast feature and get to the end of the podcasts from that particular author, I would have to switch to the next podcast manually – not something that is easy or legal to do whilst driving.

In another rant, why did they make the option to mark items as new/not new now watched/unwatched? I don’t know that many people who watch mp3’s and I think most people have far more mp3’s than they do video files.

Oh – and stop offering me the iphone configuration utility, safari4 and MobileMe. If I’ve unchecked it once that probably means I don’t want it – grrr.

Network Migration Workbook arrived.

The Zero downtime migration strategies for Microsoft Networks book by Karl and Manuel Palachuk has arrived in the post this morning. An expensive book but I’m hoping this will reduce the number of weekends I have to work. Even if the book saves me 5-6 hours once, it will be well worth it.
590 pages to read, full of checklists and stuff – I’m looking forward to going through this. Unfortunately it came 5 days late for last weekends migration.
I’ll be writing a review later when I get a chance to start reading on it.

Adobe Reader download still at 9.1

I can’t believe that after all this time the Adobe Reader offered from adobe.com is still version 9.1 requiring another 27.6mb “upgrade” after the initial installation.

Seriously – how hard is it to provide an installer with the latest version of your software when old versions are extremely vulnerable to attack?

In case you are wondering, this is not my machine – so I don’t really have much choice on what pdf reader is installed. At home I am using Sumatra pdfreader as it is one small 1.4mb portable exe file rather than adobe’s 27mb download. It’s a tag ugly due to the bright yellow page displayed when no pdf is opened but once a pdf is opened it looks great.