How to manage large numbers of audio files?

Thanks for the pointer to that URL. It contained some interesting information. Right near the end (as you pointed out), it says:

"You can also set iTunes to automatically update iPod with selected songs or playlists only. This is useful if you only want to transfer a portion of your music library to iPod."

The only thing is, they don't say how to do that. Making an intuitive guess, based on the options supplied in the iTunes Preferences window, I would suspect that I would need to a) check the box that says "Manually manage songs and playlists", b) also check the box below that, which says "Only update checked songs", and then c) make sure that I "check" (or "uncheck") all appropriate songs, so that I never try to put more music on my iPod than it can hold!

Does that sound like it would work? If so, then I could just check the 15,000 songs that are on the iPod now, import all the rest of my music library, but leave them UNCHECKED, until I wanted to "rotate" them onto the iPod -- at which time I'd have to "uncheck" ones I wished to remove from the iPod. Does that sound like I'm understanding it correctly?

Thanks.

Thanks for the suggestion. Here's my problem using playlists to update my tracks. (And maybe I'm missing something, so feel free to bring me up to date, if I am.) I have roughly 15,000 tracks on my iPod right now. I have another 6-7,000 on my hard drive, but not in my iTunes music library. I want to be able to "rotate" albums in and out, but keep the maximum to the current 15,000 (since my iPod is now "full").

Doing the rotation based on something like "tracks I haven't listened to in xxx days" wouldn't work, since there are LOTS of those 15,000 tracks that I haven't listened to in a long time -- but I do like having them there, and don't want to delete them. In fact, using playlists *at all* for this updating seems like more work, as I would then need to continually be modifying my playlists, right?

I suppose I could just have one ENORMOUS playlist of EVERYTHING I want to put on my iPod. And then modify that playlist as I rotate albums in and out. But is that very different than using the checkmark approach?

Also, I did try the checkmark thing briefly this morning, and I'm disappointed to find that it does NOT work as I suspected. (I sure wish that one Apple article had mentioned HOW it's supposed to work!) I went into iTunes, made sure that my iPod was updated according to what was in my music library at the time. Then I "unchecked" all the tracks in one album, as a test. I re-synched my iPod, expecting that the "unchecked" tracks would disappear. They did not. So it appears that the check mark is more of an indicator of which tracks to *look at* during a synchronization process. And if certain tracks aren't checked, then they won't be updated -- which includes being removed!

So I still see no way to remove tracks from my iPod, but leave them in my iTunes music library.

Is this really an "abnormal" thing to do??? I would have thought it would have come up before...

OK, to put this to rest, I think I've finally got something I can work with. I took your suggestion, and tried a "super-playlist". In other words, I just made a playlist from everything in my current iTunes music library. I then reset the Preferences so that, instead of updating everything on my iPod, it only updates using this "super-playlist". (The first time through, that was the ONLY playlist I checked. Then I found that all my other playlists disappeared from the iPod! So I discovered that I had to go back and check each of them, as well.)

So far, so good. Updating seemed to work OK. Then I took the next step -- which was to add another 5,000 tracks to the iTunes music library (but NOT to the "super-playlist" -- yet). I made sure that they got imported and organized correctly, and that I could now view ALL of my tracks in iTunes.

Finally, I did another iPod Update... wondering if it would "overflow"... but it worked just as it was supposed to. It didn't try to add ANY of the new tracks to the iPod (which is what I wanted).

So now, I expect that the proper sequence of events to "rotate" music off of, and onto, my iPod would be to a) decide what I want to remove, b) delete those entries FROM THE SUPER-PLAYLIST, BUT NOT THE MUSIC LIBRARY, c) decide what I want to "rotate in", d) drag those entries TO the super-playlist, and e)synchronize the iPod.

Just as a side question, I now have a "playlist" of 15,000 tracks -- a playlist that I will never, obviously, use as an actual playlist (i.e., to listen to). Isn't that an awfully large file to copy to the iPod, when it'll never be used there? In other words, I only need it for the iTunes synchronization. Is there any way to leave it there for that purpose, and say "Don't copy the playlist itself to the iPod"?