Smart Playlists be damned!
I, just like the rest of the iPhone fans out there, installed the iPhone OS 3.0 update last night and spent the remainder of the night in the basement playing with the new features. After going through all the big features (cut/paste, push notification, Spotlight, etc.) I decided to dig in and see how the little things I was looking for turned out.
I’m sad to say that the one thing I really wanted didn’t make it into the update. Smart Playlists still don’t live update properly on the iPhone.
Just in case you haven’t really delved into the power of Smart Playlists in iTunes, you can set lots of criteria to create a dynamic playlist that updates itself. For a long time I had a Smart Playlist that only contained songs in my library that had never been played. But, I realized that this list was prohibitive to many songs I liked, so I set up a list comprised of a random sampling of songs that hadn’t been played in the last month.
Now, ideally, if you have a Smart Playlist of 100 songs that meet that criteria, once the first song is played your playlist should be 99 songs long. That’s not the case with the iPhone. For some reason it doesn’t live update. There have been workarounds published on the interwebs that show you can fix this by creating your first Smart Playlist with all the criteria and then creating a second list whose only criteria is “Playlist is (name of first Smart Playlist)”
This only sort of works. The lists only properly update when you sync the iPhone. They’re supposed to update on the fly though.
I bring this up only because for me personally, I’d have rather had working Smart Playlists in OS 3.0 over copy/paste. Because as glaring of an omission as copy/paste was from the first two incarnations of iPhone OS, I can honestly only think of one time over the months that I’ve had the iPhone (and the iPod Touch for months before that) that I ran into a situation where I legitimately said, “Damn, I wish this thing would copy/paste.” However, I use the iPod function of the phone daily, and every day I use the “month old” Smart Playlist, and I want it to NOT REPEAT SONGS DURING THE DAY BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT I PROGRAMMED IT TO AVOID, DAMMIT! Amirite?
Call me whiny, but it seems to me that if the first 5 generations of iPods worked just fine with this iTunes feature, then it should be no problem to get in there and get that fixed in the next incremental update. I know I’m not the only one irked by this.