How to turn on / off live updating for all smart playlists at once?

This is a great idea. I also have many smart playlists, and because my library is huge (2.5TB), it slows down iTunes a great deal. So if I could have Live Updating off, and then have one button to update all smart playlists at once, that would be great.

There is no way to automatically enable and disable automatic updating of smart playlists, though it would be a good feature. I write scripts many of which could work a lot faster I could get iTunes to wait until the script has finished making multiple changes before playlists are updated. Although there is some limited involvement from the community specialists Apple don't directly address feature requests in these forums. Suggestions should go to iTunes Feedback.

tt2

i really wish apple would take this issue seriously -- i've been after them to add a global "smart updates off" control for 5 major versions now.

the problem seems to stem from the need to mandatorily update the XML version of the library after every single metadata change once the library crosses some as yet undetermined level of complexity. this means that itunes is recalculating and writing to disk practically every time you move the mouse -- in my case it is a 50-60 beach ball interlude every couple of seconds....

i have stumbled on a workaround: if you make all of your smart playlists dependent on a single smart playlist, and you deliberately break the playlist (by making it depend on a dumb playlist, which you delete without changing the dependency) it will break all of the other smart updating that refers to the broken list. this substantially improves performance, and can be undone by deleting the playlist dependency on the deleted playlist..,.,

it is awkward as **** and could quite easily be replaced with a real switch, if Apple cared at all about power users

which they don't

Well, it's less than ideal in that it takes some time to churn through all your playlists (and you can't do anything else on your computer while it's running), but here's a little script to switch off live updating on all of your smart playlists. I'm still running iTunes 10, so you may need to tweak it a bit for your own use.

tell application "iTunes"

activate

set allPlaylists to (get every user playlist)

repeat with thisPlaylist in allPlaylists

if (thisPlaylist is smart) and name of thisPlaylist is not in {"Music", "Movies", "Podcasts", "Books", "TV Shows", "iTunes U", "Apps", "Ping", "iTunes DJ", "Genius"} then

set view of browser window 1 to thisPlaylist

tell application "System Events"

tell process "iTunes"

tell menu bar 1

tell menu bar item "File"

tell menu "File"

click menu item "Edit Smart Playlist"

end tell

end tell

end tell

set theCheckbox to checkbox "Live updating" of window 1

tell theCheckbox

if (its value as boolean) then click theCheckbox

end tell

click button "OK" of window 1

end tell

end tell

end if

end repeat

end tell

Small improvement should make it run a tad faster.

tell application "iTunes"

activate

set allPlaylists to (get every user playlist whose (smart is true and special kind is none))

repeat with thisPlaylist in allPlaylists

set view of browser window 1 to thisPlaylist

tell application "System Events"

tell process "iTunes"

tell menu bar 1

tell menu bar item "File"

tell menu "File"

click menu item "Edit Smart Playlist"

end tell

end tell

end tell

set theCheckbox to checkbox "Live updating" of window 1

tell theCheckbox

if (its value as boolean) then click theCheckbox

end tell

click button "OK" of window 1

end tell

end tell

end repeat

end tell

Nice, but sadly no use on Windows. 😉

tt2

this is exactly what i was hoping to see -- but i can't get it to run right on iTunes 12, yosemite

it also doesn't seem to recognize "Home Videos" or "Audiobooks" as special and tries to turn them off -- i modified the earlier script to add those two to the lists of exclusions, but still get the same error message on the first "unspecial/real" smart playlist -- hasn't somethign changed in the object model perhaps?

thank you muchly!

=mjb

tell application "iTunes"

activate

set allPlaylists to (get every user playlist)

repeat with thisPlaylist in allPlaylists

if (thisPlaylist is smart) and name of thisPlaylist is not in {"Music", "Movies", "Podcasts", "Books", "TV Shows", "iTunes U", "Apps", "Ping", "iTunes DJ", "Genius", "Home Videos", "Audiobooks"} then

set view of browser window 1 to thisPlaylist

tell application "System Events"

tell process "iTunes"

tell menu bar 1

tell menu bar item "File"

tell menu "File"

clickmenu item "Edit Smart Playlist"

end tell

end tell

end tell

set theCheckbox to checkbox "Live updating" of window 1

tell theCheckbox

if (its value as boolean) then clicktheCheckbox

end tell

clickbutton "OK" of window 1

end tell

end tell

end if

end repeat

end tell