Lets raise MONEY for SMARTPLAYLISTS!

To be honest I never used EphPod. Apple released iTunes for Windows about the time I got my first, 1G iPod. Not that I wish to dis. the People behind EphPod, but whats it good for when there's iTunes with it's creamy smooth 'Smart Playlists' Built-in!

Now I'm aware that EphPod can do things that iTunes can't. (i.e. Contacts), I find Windows Explorer to sufice for that porpuse though. As for News I use 'Goolge Get' (when the mood takes me).

The point is?!?! Why aren't you useing iTunes, for 'Smart Playlists'?

what is a smart playlist? i just got my 4g ipod and i hate apple but this is a good product so i bought it. so what is all the smart playlists about?

Hey if your happy with ephpod thats cool, but you don't have to do autosync with iTunes. You can set it for manual update which would allow you to delte songs at will from iTunes and your hard drive and keep them on the iPod and then can make smartplaylists directly on your iPod.

The only thing that would be missing is syncing via directory, but with appropriate ID3 tags playlists could make up for this.

It probably still isn't going to work for you the exact way you want, but using manual sync gives a different level of control to your music and maintains access to smartplaylists.

I may have misunderstood parts of your message. To me it sounds like you delete stuff from your hard drive so there should be minimal old to new ratio. Once into iTunes you could make a very simple playlist in the iTunes library that would grab songs recently imported and then select the playlist and drag those songs to an iPod in manual mode. The managing really isn't that much extra work, but that is just my opinion.

For the most simpliest synchronization, though, the autosync is really the way to go. If you have plenty of room on your internal or an external drive all you have to do is sync the iTunes library a simple connect, wait a moment, disconnect and you are done. No muss no fuss.

I likely won't change your mind though, and I won't attempt too hard. I just like to put forward ways of thinking some people havn't thought of. I learn a thing or two along the way as well from time to time.

I also don't look at a media player such as iTunes as an extra layer on top of a file system I look at it as a "Window" to the file system. iTunes has such powerful browse and sorting functions that I find so much easier to use than looking in a directory. If I need to get to the actual file for some reason I can select the song in iTunes and either right click or give a key command for it to open a separate window that shows me the song file.

This too is just my opinon. You will find many organization schemes on here though if you search the forums or wait for discussions to come up. You will eventually find what is right for you.

Cheers,
Stu

BTW, you may want to know that iTunes 4.7 has duplicate track locating feature.

I have some what similar situation. I have backed up some of the entire directories in to CDs to free up disk space. I have transfered the tracks to the iPod by inserting the CD and dragging and dropping the directories in to iTunes. After doing this I take the CD out and the next time when I start iTunes there will be a small exclamation mark next to the tracks that were imported from the CD because iTunes cannot see those files anymore in my PC hard disk. So I know exactly which tracks are in my iPod only and which are in both iPod and PC hard disk.

I haven't done this, but my thinking is that you can just sort the tracks using the column that shows this exclamation mark and then delete them from iTunes if needed. At the next sync they should be deleted from iPod also.

The down side of moving your tracks in to CDs is that you cannot update the tag information anymore. Apart from that this works fine for me. In summary I have more tracks in my iPod that in my PC hard disk.

jk