When I got my new 160gig iPod classic I was very excited. I had recently outgrown my 60gig 5th gen iPod and now I was going to have so much elbow room that I’m trying to grow more elbows.
Although it was now going to be able hold all my music, podcasts AND all the video bits that I’ve been accumulating, I didn’t want to wait for it all to sync so I only synced a few of my most listened to lists. Almost right away I discovered a problem. My smart play lists are not working. Specifically, they have stopped live updating.
Trolling around the apple support boards I find that many people profess never to use the smart play lists (SPLs). Maybe it’s because I’m a geek but I can’t imagine using my iPod without SPLs. When I listen to a list of podcasts I don’t want to hear podcasts I’ve already heard. So my podcast list requires podcasts to have a playcount==0.
I’ll listen to songs more than once, but I don’t want to hear the same list that I heard yesterday, so my music lists usually pull the songs from a least-recently-played list.
SPLs are the number one reason I stay in the iPod camp. I would gladly experiment with other MP3 players (they’re cheaper) if they would implement live updating SPLs.
So I’ve been frustrated and blaming apple, but it seems like it was my fault.
Many of my SPLs contain other SPLs. Apple has had problems in the past with nested SPLs and I thought “Now it’s back” but I found that the iPod will not update SPLs when the SPLs it contains are not also on the iPod.
Ok, I can understand that to a point. If my list A has a rule saying that, among other criteria, a song must also be in list B, and list B is not available, I can’t really figure out what list A should be. So Apple’s approach on the iPod is that list A is calculated in iTunes, where list B is available and then written to the iPod as a static list. The list will not update until the next time you connect to iTunes.
The fix to getting SPLs to update on the iPod as songs are played is to make sure that any and all included SPLs are also on the iPod. Or, in my case, my lists are nested multiple levels deep, I just sync everything again.
Problem solved.
I still blame Apple to some extent though. They could have handled this differently. They could have silently included dependent lists and hid them. Or they could have put up an error informing me that I’ve marked a list as “Live Updating” but that I’ve neglected to included dependent lists during the sync.