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Managing music on my iPhone
(Please forgive the nerd talk and whining about first-world problems in the post herein.)
I’ve had my 8GB iPhone since October, and I love it dearly. It’s a great phone, and with the iPhone 2.0 update and the App Store, it’s even more useful/addictive than before. With it, I can travel (even in Europe and Canada) without a laptop, for the first time in years. The only real burr in my ass has been how to pick and choose what songs are synced to it from my ~35 GB of music in my iTunes library.
I started off by making a playlist called “iPhone”, and dragged about 7GB of music there. That was fine, but invariably, at some point I’d be far away from my laptop, wanting to listen to recent Tre Orsi recordings so I could write lyrics or cringe at my guitar playing. (We record most practices, and we also send a lot of GarageBand demos back and forth to each other, all of which I diligently obsessively categorize in iTunes.) So, I created a Smart Playlist for anything with the Artist name “Tre Orsi”, and setup iTunes to sync that playlist as well.
So now I had a Smart Playlist for anything Tre Orsi-related, and one big playlist for anything else I might want to hear. But this still wasn’t working too well for me, for a couple of reasons:
- Because of space considerations, I’d often find myself removing albums from the iPhone playlist that I consider “essential” records — personal favorites that I always turn to when I’m burned out on new music, tired from work, etc. I’d then forget to re-add them later, so I’d be without, say Double Nickels On The Dime.
- I buy a lot of music (vinyl, CD, and downloads from eMusic/blogs/etc) which gets imported into iTunes. There’s often so much new stuff, though, that I forget to add it to the iPhone playlist and it sits in iTunes for months before I get around to listening to it.
So tonight, on the walk home from dinner, I had a little “ah-ha” moment and a possible solution to these “problems”. (The wheels of insight turn slowly, but they do turn.) I created a few new playlists to my iPhone, and setup iTunes to sync them to my iPhone:
- Tre Orsi (Smart Playlist): anything with the Artist name of “Tre Orsi”
- iPhone: Essential (regular Playlist): albums I always want available. The afore-mentioned Double Nickels, MX-80′s Crowd Control and Out of the Tunnel, the Marked Men, etc. . .
- iPhone: Rotation (regular Playlist): a standard playlist, updated whenever I want, of things I’m currently interested in.
- iPhone: Recently Added (Smart Playlist): this Smart Playlist’s rules are simple: anything not already in the above three playlists, and limited to 700 MB, selected by most recently added. (The 700 MB is an arbitrary number. It could be also be number of songs, total time, etc. . .)
A big benefit is that I can easily see how much space is taken up by stuff I care less about (the Rotation), so pruning my playlists in order to fit them on the iPhone will be less of a chore. Also, now my most recent additions to the library are always available so I will (hopefully) be more likely to finally check out things I’ve had sitting around forever.