Smart Playlists on the road

[mmcirvin]

One of my favorite unsung (and almost undocumented) features of iPods is their ability to do live updating of Smart Playlists on the fly. It's not 100% consistent with the way it works in iTunes; you have to back out of the playlist screen and reenter it to make the list change. There are other minor glitches in the way it works. But I like that it happens at all, and it means that Smart Playlists can offer variety over the long haul without even syncing the iPod.

I don't have one of the iPod models that got a firmware upgrade with the most recent revision, but those who have report that live updating of Smart Playlists has quietly disappeared. (Some are unnerved by this Apple page claiming that the feature never existed, but if you look closely, you'll see that the page is from 2002, which was before iPods actually did this. The feature is briefly documented here.)

If you use a lot of Smart Playlists on your iPod, you might take notice.

Update: Sheesh, Apple just pulled the old page from 2002 saying that Smart Playlists don't update live. I guess the conspiracy theorists fretted about them editing history sufficiently to drive them to edit history. (To be fair, these Knowledge Base articles aren't there primarily for historic archival purposes...)

Comments

[ckd]

I did notice this feature some time ago, but I effectively lost it when I started using playlists-of-playlists. Those don't update on the iPod, at least on my 30GB 3G ("dock connector") model.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Right, I don't think those ever updated live on the iPod. Apple may have decided that the feature was too complex and fragile to keep. I know that they made a bunch of changes to the structure of the internal database (apparently the song filenames on the iPod are now hashcodes!)