playlists not syncing

kobold wrote:

WTFBBQ???

You'd lost me there, but Google comes to the rescue.

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Urban dictionary definition number 4:

When someone is surprised, they will say this. It is used by mostly teens who have lack of grasping of maturity, much like the word emo. You will rarely hear, nor see this used by an adult, due to the fact this is a word for kids.

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Only joking - one of the other definitions may apply - but all these acronyms can be really confusing. I was going to say I'm just becoming a GOM, but none of the definitions there mean what I do!

AC

kobold

Are all the playlists available all the time on AppleTV, or only when the MBP and iTunes are on.

It may be that the other are showing because they are shown as part of the streaming feed.

I assume that under the Music tab for AppleTv you have sync music checked and selected playlists on with the relevant ones checked.

Are you doing custom sync, if so tick the show only synced items to see if that get rid of them - it might show if the others are streaming.

In the main music library you can uncheck individual items you don't want to stream - for playlists though there doesn't seem to be an equivalent tickbox to do this.

I don't use playlists much myself apart from burning CDs, and I only have 2 checked to sync - one called AppleTV Sync that I stick all the stuff I want to sync into, and the Smart playlist Music Videos.

I'll check to see if my other playlists show on AppleTV.

AC

Ok - I've only got 2 playlists checked to sync in iTunes.

With iTunes on however, I see every playlist from iTunes on the AppleTV too.

If I then turn iTunes off some of the playlists disappear from AppleTv but not all - I've still got about 20 - these seem to be playlists which include SOME content synced to AppleTV.

With iTunes closed:

Party shuffle playlist has 1 item on AppleTV
Recently played has 10 tracks

Open iTunes again and navigate list:

All the other playlists reappear.
Party Shuffle - over 200 items now
Recently Played - over 70 items now (but 116 in iTunes)

So basically:

I think all Playlist lists sync whether you like it or not.
The songs however only sync if the playlists are checked.
Playlists you haven't chosen to sync still appear when iTunes is off, if any of them contain 1 or more songs from one of the synced playlist - so in itunes maybe 50 songs, but the Playlist appears as a synced playlist contains one or more of these songs.
All playlists show when streaming - though some do not match those in iTunes ? due to local creation os Smart Playlists/Party Shuffle.

Odd but you don't seem to be alone in this.

If you feel strongly you want absolute control over the actual Playlists synced, rather than just the songs contained therein send feedback to the usual.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/appletv.html

I can imagine this would be frustrating if you had a party, itunes was off and loads of playlists appeared with only a couple of tracks in them. Would also be an annoyance if you took the AppleTV somehwere to use at a party. Only way around it would be by having mutually exclusive tracks in every created playlist which would be daft.

AC

kobold wrote:
Alley Cat,

The "show only synced items" was not checked, and has since resolved my problem. That's a bit weird to me. Why would iTunes sync things that i didn't have selected when i said "sync selected." That seems a bit stupid. Maybe i don't understand something, but if i want to sync selected things, and i select them and it's syncing the others as well, then it's "syncing all", not "syncing selected." You know??

You probably appreciate the difference between syncing and streaming but I'll recap anyway.

With syncing, music files selected in playlists copy over to AppleTV (unless you've selected all music to copy), so are available when the Mac is off.

Streaming allows files not stored on AppleTv to be played on the fly across the network via iTunes.

You can have 1 sync iTunes library (which is also able to stream), and up to 5 (or maybe 4) separate Sharing iTunes libraries which if active appear under Shared Music etc on AppleTV (you don't see this if you've only got a sync library set up).

Now in the original AppleTV versions 1.0/1.1, which came out before the push to ram iTunes store into every menu in versions 2.0+, you had a quite logical Sources option.

Sources used to let you choose either AppleTV stored content or an iTunes library stream depending on how you want to use it. It was very logical - play what's stored locally on AppleTV or connect and show me what's in my iMac's iTunes libray and avaiable to stream.

Since 2.0 there is a 'feature' of dubious merit which scuppers the distinction.

The sync library has always been able to both sync or stream to AppleTV, but since 2.0+ AppleTV automatically merges the lists of content available to stream and the list of synced stuff to produce one list.

If the file in the list is on AppleTV is plays it locally from AppleTV hard drive, if not it gets it from an iTunes stream. While a good idea in theory this list merging doesn't seem to dynamically update effectively. In 1.0/1.1 if you added a new file to your library the streaming list on AppleTV would reflect it straight away - this doesn't happen with 2.0+ which leads to confusion and I think may explain what you see.

If you boot the AppleTv with the computer off, you'll only have a list of the synced content to choose from.

When you open iTunes however on the sync computer, it syncs with AppleTv automatically, and gives it a list of stuff available to stream (the 'show only synced content' option stops it doing this).

What I think you're seeing is the effect of turning off iTunes and the list not updating on AppleTV.

So, you had an album with 11 tracks available as it was streaming it with iTunes on. Turn iTunes off and the only 2 album tracks on AppleTV are those included in playlists synced to it. You may get an error saying some content is no longer available. Restart iTunes and the lists will revise and be full again. Restarting AppleTV would also 'refresh' the list on AppleTV.

As I mentioned it seems that all the playlists are all synced, but these are just the LISTS of songs not the actual songs themselves. So if you have a song in several playlists, even if those playlists are not selected for syncing, the playing name appear for selection as one or more of the songs exist on AppleTv by virtue of it existing in another synced playlist. Most of the other songs in these non-synced playlists are not there so don't show, hence odd short playlists. Now fire up iTunes and all the playlists should be full.

I have an iPhone as well. Do you have an iPod/iTouch/iPhone? How do you manage your iTunes with the ATV and your portable device? I'm just curious as i basically have playlists instead of doing the "checked music" thing.

I've never particularly liked 'syncing' software and prefer to do things manually as you have more control.

I used to have Archos and iRiver Mp3 players which were streets ahead of iPods at the time, and got used to simple drag and drop and organising by folders.

I haven't used my iPod for ages, that's because I use the iPhone all the time for music, and with that I manually manage content by drag and drop - I wish this was available on AppleTv and in both directions but it's not there.

I consider myself a power user, but only in terms of Logic Studio, production, and graphics. I typically haven't used iTunes and some of the other native programs to their fullest extent. So i am experiencing a bit of a learning curve here.

It's a long long time since I've read a physical or PDF manual for anything from cover to cover - part of the problem these days is information overload - I get things to do what I want them to and don't care about the other 90% of features I'd never use. Same goes for things like iTunes.

If you decide you want to stream but want to leave out some of your content just deselect the tick in the music section of your iTunes library and they won't stream - one of those things I found out here but would never have guessed.

We all use software differently and what's important for some isn't for others.

AC