Manually and quickly updating smart playlists with 'Live Updating' off?

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Manually and quickly updating smart playlists with 'Live Updating' off?

Hi,

I have a quite large music library (13,000 songs) and use a multitude of nested smart playlists that change often because I don't want to listen to the same song every day and I want to listen to good songs more often than bad songs. I'm also splitting up by genre, because not all my friends appreciate all of my musical tastes, and I myself am not always in the mood for every genre.

The consequence of this is that from time to time, iTunes stutters when playing a new song, presumably because it's updating all the smart playlists when the previous song ended.

Now, I had hoped that turning 'Live Updating' off would cause iTunes to update the smart playlists at startup instead of updating continuously. However, it turns out that though the performance improved dramatically, turning off 'Live Updating' caused the smart playlists to never update. Obviously I don't want that, since that means all my smart playlists are static.

Is there a way to have both good performance and easy updating of the playlists? There are a bit too many playlists to manually update very day by forcing iTunes to update the playlist.

An 'Update all smart playlists now' button or a 'Update all smart playlists at startup' feature would be nice... 😐

Any hints, tips, help, suggestions?

Thank you so much.
Greetings,
Tijl Kindt

Athlon64 3800+ 2GB RAM Windows XP iPod Nano 4GB Black

Posted on May 10, 2007 4:08 AM

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Answer 1

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Robert Jacobson1

Level 4

2,427 points

May 10, 2007 9:04 AM in response to Astroquicky

Do you have any programming experience? Although the iTunes SDK doesn't allow you to directly turn live updating on or off for a playlist, you can use playlist selection and keyboard commands to iterate through all (or specified) smart playlists and toggle live updating.

If you don't have programming experience, I guess the best you can do is find a friend to do it ( I might, if I get bored...), or to give feedback to Apple and hope that they implement it in the next release
http://www.apple.com/feedback

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Answer 2

Astroquicky Author

Level 1

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May 10, 2007 9:31 AM in response to Robert Jacobson1

Yes, I do have programming experience, though not with iTunes SDK.

So you're saying that using the iTunes SDK, I could theoretically make something that allows me to select a playlist with a keystroke and turn live updating on and off with another keystroke? I won't be able to toggle live updating on for all playlists at once?

Could you be a little more specific on what could be realized with the SDK? I have no knowledge about the iTunes SDK, and I'd rather have an idea whether what I'm going to do is actually going to improve my user experience significantly before I delve into the programming too deeply.

Thank you for your time.
Greetings,
Tijl Kindt

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Answer 3

May 10, 2007 10:15 AM in response to Astroquicky

Using the SDK, you (well, I) would do something like this:
1. Get a list of all the playlists in the iTunes Library.
2. For each playlist, test if playlist is a Smart playlist (Playlist->Smart() returns a boolean)
2a. If it is a smart playlist, select it by setting a property value for the BrowserWindow object (basically BrowserWindow->SelectedPlaylist(playlist object)) (for example perl code, see http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/browse_thread/thread/1248563d 743795d8/be1a88fc6eeab0e4?lnk=gst&q=itunesperlselectedplaylist&rnum=1#be1a88fc6eeab0e4)
2b. Using keystrokes (Alt-F,G), select "File..Get Info". Then keystroke Alt-U to toggle live updating, then Enter to click OK.
2c. Repeat above, which should toggle live updating off again. (unfortunately there is no way to be sure whether the starting state was off or on -- I'm assuming it will always be off)

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