Doh! Made it too complicated.

Don't need the "For Deletion" Playlist, just make all of the corresponding smart playlists "Playlist is Driving Mix" "Rating is not 1 star"

JeffDrake

How does this work if you want your other Playlists available on the iPod? I sync a bunch of playlists, and I actually, y'know, Play them. If I switch to this, sure I can delete stuff, but then I'm stuck only playing by album and artist, aren't I?

It seems like it would make much more sense to make a smart playlist "For Deletion", where it matches Rating is 1 Star, then have two copies of every playlist I have. 1 would be "zDriving Mix", and be a normal playlist I add stuff to, and the other would be "Driving Mix", a Smart Playlist saying Playlist Is zDriving Mix and Playlist is Not For Deletion.

Or am I missing something obvious?

JeffDrake

I 4 or 5-star anything I want to listen to. This way all I have to do is sync the My Top Rated smart playlist to my iPod. This also saves room (on my 2gb nano). If I go to a party where my misguided friends want to listen to rap/hip-hop then all I have to do is sync the playlist I created called Party Mix instead. Works like a charm for me.

marksman7328

@JeffDrake: The only way to do this right now (and yes, it's a pain in the butt) is to add a line to ALL your playlists that requires the songs in them to be rated greater than 1. If you have non-auto playlists, you'll have to update them manually.

I use a similar process to this - I have playlists labeled "Rating 0", "Rating 2+", "Rating 3+", "Rating 4+", and "Rating 5". I play 2+, 3+, 4+, and 5, depending on how adventurous a mood I'm in. If I'm feeling super-adventurous and I want to sort through unrated music, I'll play Rating 0 (or shuffle all songs) and rate my unrated songs. Later, when I synch with my desktop, iTunes reallocates any newly-rated music to the correct playlist and kicks the 1-star music off my iPod altogether.

m3rkvry

@JeffDrake:

I think you'd be in the clear so long as you select the other playlists as well. The tutorial makes it seem that way, anyway:

From Step 2:

"Set your iPod to Sync selected playlists, and choose the "Sync iPod" playlist. If you have other playlists that you also want on your iPod make sure you check those too. Just don't check the "for iPod" playlist."

volatility

Other approach: Buy an ipod with an actual hard drive. My 80GB is actually hard to fill, so requires not much management (side note- there is no point in watching movies on a 2" screen).

OTOH: use the 1-star rating for stuff you actually HATE and want to delete. Then have a 1-Star smart playlist, that you can use to figure out what to hard delete off your harddrive and iPod.

I wonder if there is a way to, via smart playlist or script to take anything with a 1-star and uncheck it. Now, that would be slick. Wouldn't have to smart up all your playlists.

Last thing: if you want dumb playlists (as opposed to smart ones and want to use this system, just make a smart one that has rules:
1- Is Playlist X
2- Is not 1 Star
Sync the smarties, don't sync the dummies.

But really, why is anyone keeping music they don't like anywhere?

PotKettleBlack

I wrote a whole blog post on how I manage my iTunes Library with my iPod iTouch. Since iTunes is the only application to really play well with the iPod I am forced to use it but I have found some good work arounds with regard to updating missing album art as well as updating my library and tags: [danieltmurphy.com]

murph2481

umm...

or you could do like I do and set up a smart playlist that only has albums with an average rating of 4 stars or higher... and then sync to that...

djxspike

Or you could just manually manage your iPod by checking the box...

Funkmon

This is new? I've been using star ratings to control my iPod library for years now.

Pinwiz11

I *hate* iTunes. Personally I use either Realplayer or Winamp. Any ideas on how this can be done using either of these?

mskadu

The only thing I'm all that curious about iPod-wise is if there's any way of setting iTunes to just synchronise *Music*, whilst leaving Videos to be manually managed. As things stand, I'd quite like to free up the 20-odd-gigabytes of my HD that my Movies are taking up and just leave them for viewing on the iPod.

Any way of doing this whilst keeping syncing functionality intact?

AirRaven

I never bothered with rating songs until recently...until I got tired of skipping over "slower" songs at the gym (where I spend 90% of my iPod time).

So I started rating songs (w/ one star) for my 'workout mix' -- either in iTunes or on my iPod as they pop up on shuffle. After a few weeks, I had a couple hundred songs guaranteed for a good workout.

Now I have a playlist that's 75 minutes long, only w/ 1-star songs that I haven't heard in the past week. It's a great way to have a fresh mix of workout songs, and no more worrying about "Bridge over Troubled Water" popping up on the bench press...

NeatFreakGeek

This is a good tip, but I've been doing it for years. My star rating system looks like this:

3-5 stars: actual substantive ratings
2 stars: keep the track, but will seldom get listened to. (Is there any music you would rate 2 stars that you would also want to listen to?

1 star: Delete the track entirely, or replace it with a non-defective track.

malloy

Or just uninstall iTunes and get something else that actually lets you manage the data that you own....

Once I learned that iTunes doesn't let you synchronize from the iPod to your music library, I swore I would never use it. My room mate hosed up her entire music library (imagine renaming the artist to "asdf" for every track in your library), and even though the data on the iPod was still valid there was no easy way to restore her music library. So, even if your computer dies and you have a valid copy of your library on the iPod, iTunes can't help you. I had been syncing bi-directionally for years with my Creative player / software, so this was a real shock to me. iTunes does have a feature now that will let you sync iTunes Store-purchased tracks from the iPod to your library, but nothing else.

IMO, they're just too worried that you might actually get your hands on the data that is rightfully yours. I'll go with something else that lets me sync every file bidirectionally, and gives me full control of my data. I'm using Winamp right now, but I'm sure there's an even better solution out there.

trunk8

for syncing your ipod without itunes, try floola [www.floola.com] .

i had some bad luck with it (it randomly shuffled my album art to the wrong tracks), but you will probably fare better. also, i think you can pull music back out of your ipod into your computer from it.

downside: no smart playlists, like this article's about.

nekochan

I dont keep any music on my computer, it's all on my iPod. This tutorial doesn't help me or anybody else like me at all. I wish there was an easier way. Anybody know any good iTunes substitutes?

Pulseczar

I do love smart playlists It was mildly irritating at first coming from a manually managed music player. But once i got the hang of them It takes all the effort out of my day to day playlists.

I've just added the this clause to the playlist i use to keep 2 months of recently added songs on my Touch, Could be a first listen through but i know a 1*er when i hear one. And who wants a 1*er stinking up the iPod like a corpse at a summer barbeque

@Trunk8
It seemed to me, for the very reason iTunes doesn't allow you bi-directional control over the data, that there are dozens of other programs that help with this, and probably do a better job anyway. Senuti for OS X immediately springs to mind. There must be equivilents for the other OS's

ManiacFive

Another way to do this is to add the unwanted songs to the On-The-Go playlist (assuming you don't use the latter).

I already use the one-star rating for my downtempo/chill playlist (I don't use the star system to rate how much I like songs).

Deprong Mori

I have this playlist that I like called "Unknown Favorites".
I am an avid star labeler, so on this smart playlist, I have songs that are not stared but have been played over 4 times. I'm listening to the darn song, so I must like it.

Antonio

Good idea PokeKettleBlack :) I done it:

---

tell application "iTunes"
set allTracks to every track
repeat with tk in allTracks
if (rating of tk is greater than 40) then
set enabled of tk to true
else
set enabled of tk to false
end if
end repeat
end tell

---

Bloodshed

Good idea PokKettle Black, I did it:

tell application "iTunes"
set allTracks to every track of playlist "Music"
repeat with tk in allTracks
if (rating of tk is greater than 40) then
set enabled of tk to true
else
set enabled of tk to false
end if
end repeat
end tell

---
Replace 40 per 20 if you want to uncheck only one-stars (here, two-stars are also unchecked). Hope it will help you.

Bloodshed

@mskadu: I hate the star system and Itunes as well. Coming from having a creative Zen beforehand when MP3's first came out and I didn't have an Ipod (I have had 3-4 now)...it's not very intuitive. If I have a mix cd, it splits the folder I drag over into 15 different artists. If I don't want that to happen then I have to go change it in Itunes, etc. Since I have a ton of mix cd's, this is a pain in the ass. Star system? I listen to whole albums not songs, who has time to rate individual songs then take them off...etc...sounds like a waste of time as long as you have the space for full albums.

wiretapstudios

My problem is that I keep several different iTunes libraries (that I can access by holding shift as I launch iTunes). If I remove all tracks from the library and then add them back in, the star rating system is gone. It doesn't save them inside the file. For this reason, I don't use the rating system.

RudePuppy

@AirRaven:

Try fiddling with "Only sync if checked", or whatever it's called. If the movies are already on, and you uncheck them, this should leave them on the iPod even once they're no longer on the computer. Maybe.

NineTailedFox