Itunes – Absoblogginlutely!

Itunes sync of smart playlist podcasts update

By Andy on Wednesday, September 23, 2009

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:-

I ended up deleting all of my old podcasts (that has given me a lot of disk space back).
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
I selected my ipod in itunes, then the podcasts tab and unchecked “automatically include all unplayed episodes of all podcasts”.
Down the bottom of the screen under “include episodes from playlists” I made sure my “Unheard Podcasts” playlist was selected.

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

By Andy on Wednesday, September 23, 2009

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.

Itunes

Can’t share music with iTunes either.

By Andy on Saturday, October 18, 2003

I’ve set up iTunes on the desktop machine and added all my mp3’s so that they are all in one place. I’ve enabled sharing and look for sharing. The help says at this point a Shared image appears under source. Unfortunately the image in the online help is missing so I can’t see what its meant to look like AND the shared files doesn’t appear. The other bad thing is that it uses (yet another) audio format, AAC, which naturally doesn’t work with much else so its yet another place to store music in. Not impressed.

Itunes

Can’t share music with iTunes either.

By Andy on Saturday, October 18, 2003

Itunes

iTunes download.

By Andy on Saturday, October 18, 2003

Loads of people have blogged about itunes being available on Windows machines. Interesting to see that the software is only available for W2k or XP machines though. Still thats ok by me, so I’ve Download ed iTunes 4 and will update you on how good it is. I just hope that the songs that I want in particular are available to download. It will certainly be cheaper for me being albums on itunes at $10 than it would for the same album in the uk at £13
Update Well it would have been nice if you could actually use the service in the uk, but apaprently you need a billing address in the states (and it looks like the bands that I wanted to download are not on the list anyway)