Empty Smart Playlists on new iPod
OK, I downloaded iTunes and loaded it up with 30 GB of music. I liked the app and decided to buy a 3G 20 GB iPod. I am running iTunes 4.2.0.72 on Windows 2000. The iPod was not recognized by iTunes until I ran the install. I was slightly worried as the install CD had iTunes 4.1 on it. After the install, iTunes still seemed to be the original "newer" version.
I hooked up my new iPod to my Firewire port and got the "You have more music that can fit on your iPod" message. ITunes then created a playlist and downloaded it to my iPod. So far so good. I disconnect my iPod and browse around and play with it.
I then started playing around creating some smart playlists. They do what I would expect in iTunes. I select these new playlists in the "Automatically update selected playlists only" portion of the iPod Preferences dialog box. The playlists download to the iPod on the next sync. Unfortunately, the smart playlists are empty on the iPod. The songs should have previously been on it from the initial download.
I poked around these forums and tried a couple of different things with no luck. I then decided to try the following. I deleted everything from the iPod. I then manually transferred one of the smart playlists to the iPod. The smart playlist was empty, but the songs in that playlist did get transferred to the iPod.
What am I missing with the smart playlists? I temporarily gave up and am in the midst of transferring the one large "My Name's iPod Selection" playlist to get most of my collection back on my iPod.
Thanks in advance for any ideas to try.
[1639 byte] By [
PlayDisc] at [2007-11-9 17:43:51]
# 1 Re: Empty Smart Playlists on new iPod
Is there a common criteria you are using for these smartlists, especially involing dates [is your date/time set!]? My thought is that something is causing the iPod to think that none of your music matches the smartlist criteria. iTunes thinks its fine, moves the songs over, but then the iPod is saying that none of these songs match this list.
Try a simple smartlist like "Artist is XXXX" , with the XXXX being an artist you have, of course.
MikeM at 2007-11-15 17:02:44 >
# 2 Re: Empty Smart Playlists on new iPod
Mike,
Thanks for the reply. I played around some and narrowed down my problem. I am getting the empty playlists of the form:
Grouping contains Acid Jazz
for example. I have it limited to 50 songs (which works in iTunes), and I have Live updating checked. I don't have the "Match only checked songs" checked, but all my songs are checked anyways. Do I need to put quotes in (i.e. "Acid Jazz")? Smart Playlists based on artist or genre are working.
I was using Groupings instead of Genre because a lot of my music is from EMusic and that's they way they had tagged it. I was thinking of spending the time and cleaning up those tags. In the mean time, I was hoping to make some smart playlists using the Grouping. Any ideas?
Thanks again for the help.
# 5 Re: Empty Smart Playlists on new iPod
I have had the exact same problem. After hours of setting up Grouping categories I discovered my favourite songs appeared to be missing. I started again with Comments - oops still no go.
I am now resorting to a combination of the Genre and Composer fields to create different lists instead - I tested it this time before typing in categories for all my songs!
tiemae at 2007-11-15 17:06:47 >
# 6 Re: Empty Smart Playlists on new iPod
Comments should work on the iPod. With the newest version of iTunes, the song is updated after the comment tag is edited, in earlier versions of iTunes, the iPod wasn't getting an updated version of the song because it didn't think it needed one when only the comment tag was changed. This was fixed with 4.2 I am told. The grouping tag as has been found out is not yet supported in the live updating/iPod database just yet. Firmware update should fix this whenever it comes.
Stu
