I want a smart playlist that's a subset of a playlist that won't fit on my device. I created a playlist in iTunes that points to a playlist that I want, but is limited in size. When I looked at this within my device in iTunes, I see the error symbol (a ! within a triangle within a circle) I clicked on the smart playlist and got "This smart playlist depends on one or more playlists which cannot be found". I infer that the playlists that cannot be found must be on the devices. But the whole reason I have that playlist is because my full playlist is too large to fit on my device. (my iPhone is small, my iPad is the largest iPad 1 available, but it also is full). My desire is to carry a subset of my large playlist that gets updated when I synchronize, so that I'm not listening to the same music all the time. -- "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department." - James Madison
As I understand it, and I may be wrong, a smart playlist is really a set of pointers to songs; if the songs don't reside on the same device, they can't be found. When you sync the smart playlist without syncing the songs pointed to from within the smart playlist, you'll get that error.
That's what it looks like. So how do I do what I want to do? -- "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department." - James Madison
That's a regular playlist. A smart playlist is a search rule. Its content is generated dynamically, and can change (e.g. 100 least recently played songs will update with a new song if you play one of the songs on the list). If the smart playlist is copied to an iOS device, the rule is copied, not the list of songs. The iOS device generates the content by searching for items which match the rule. If the smart playlist references a regular playlist which is not on the device, then the smart playlist won't have any items on the device. The only way I can think of to get around this would be to use an AppleScript or separate utility which works with iTunes, such as a random playlist creator which derives a regular playlist as a subset of the "master" one, and then sync that generated regular playlist.
Yeah, I thought about that, but I'd have to do a lot of work to learn scripting well enough. -- "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department." - James Madison
Am 28.02.2012 00:36, schrieb David Empson: Hm, I may be wrong (I'm not using playlists at all, least smart playlists), but if that's really how smart playlists work, why not just create a smart playlist with a rule for '*' (or whatever identifies every song on the device)? In this case the smart playlist should always contain all songs currently present on device, shouldn't it? Best of luck, Michael
The problem is that the set of songs on the device needs to change according to a playlist (which is a random subset of a larger playlist). The set of songs from which Howard wants a random selection is too large to fit on the device. Manually copying a smaller selection defeats the concept.
Or use an existing tool. I came across one a while ago called "Random Playlist Creator", which I haven't tried. It may be quite old, and is probably PowerPC only, which would render it incompatible with Lion. http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/17703/random-playlist-creator There may also be something suitable on Doug's AppleScripts.
The download page could not be found. I e-mailed Doug this morning asking if he had such a tool after I didn't find one. -- "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department." - James Madison
