I really like my new Nano, but then you knew I would.
The one thing that I don't like about it (and yes, there is only one thing) is the way it syncs. I had the same problem with my first iPod…
You see, I have way more than 1000 songs in my collection. I always have. When the first iPod came out, I spent HOURS writing applescripts to help me randomly shove a 5GB subset of a 10GB music collection on the the player. That was four years ago.
Since then, the music collection, like the iPod collection, has grown. The only way to manage it seemed to be to get a iPod with a huge hard drive in it. I did (60GB), and the management problems went away.
Then when I got my 1GB iPod Shuffle, I thought it had a good solution to the "grabbing a tiny subset of music" for the player. It's called "autofill" and it appears at the bottom of the iPod Shuffle screen in iTunes. You choose a playlist from the popup menu, click a couple of checkboxes and iTunes does the rest of the work for me. Yay! Elegance. That's what Apple always brings to the table.
I *assumed* (I know, I know) that the Nano interface would be similar. After all, who out there really only has 4GB or less of music in their music library. But noooooo. I'm back to managing the tunes with AppleScript.
So, anyone at Apple, if you're reading this, please take note. The Nano is really cool, I love it. I do miss the ease of shoving random tunes on it that I have with my Shuffle though. Please fix it, I don't want to have to manage a whole separate set of playlists for my Nano, I just want to grab it and go…
2 Comments
I too was puzzled by this but found smart playlists can do the job. Just set up a playlist to pull random songs. You can set the limit to the number of tunes it uses. I found 430 is good for the 2 gig Nano.
Cheers
Have you noticed that the smart playlists on the Nano don't contain the same songs as the smart playlists in iTunes – they only show the subset of songs that fit on the Nano. But this leaves for some interesting management issues too. Here's how I manage the songs now:
I start by clicking "Manually manage songs and playlists" on the iPod Nano Preferences screen.
Then I drag a bunch of smart playlists to the Nano. It eventually bitches that there are too many tracks and it will copy only the ones that will fit (and it does it in a MODAL dialog that halts everything in iTunes until you click OK – why oh why does iTunes do this? – it does finish playing the current track before halting playback)
The key thing is that all of my Smart Playlists are all on my Nano, even tho all of the tracks aren't.
I manage most of my playlists in iTunes with the Smart Playlist feature. Most of the playlists key into specific keywords in the comments field. Take "mellow" for example – I have 709 songs in iTunes where I've put "mellow" in the keyword.
Now that all of my "smart playlists" are on my nano, when I drag and drop tracks onto it by whatever means, if any of them have the right keyword in them (mellow in the example) then they will automagically end up in the mellow playlist on the Nano.
Then I do like you say, have one Playlist that I use to manage what I'm going to manually grab with a select-all and drag to the Nano. Once the tunes get there, they are broken out amongst the 200 or so smart playlists that I have waiting for them. This also works with date based or play count based smart playlists (i.e. the top 100 most played songs on iTunes is a completely different top 100 most played songs on the Nano (because of the limited selection actually on the Nano), but I only set the playlist up once).
I'd still like to see the addition of the Autofill button, but now that I've learned a bunch of work-arounds it doesn't seem so important.