Travel Technology - iPOD Question: Rotating Music Selection

I have a friend who has a mammoth music collection. I'm talking 14,000 or more ripped CDs. He was thinking about a 64 gig Touch for its video and music capacity, but was looking for an option which would automatically rotate music on his iPOD. He wants to designate a core collection of favorite albums as permanent and shuffle in and out the other stuff. Is there any programs out there for the PC which can do this? (Does iTunes itself support this?). He is looking for something that is pretty much automatic after it is programmed up. Just "dock and swap."

Yes, it is. It only depends on the effort and method you want to do. iTunes brings all things along you need.


"Import" all you music in iTunes, i.e. iTunes will know where which peace of music is.


Rate all your music in order to sort out what you really do not want to show up in your iPod, Touch, ... Best way is probably to have everything without being rated so far as 0 * , worst 1 *, ... best 5*


Use the intelligent list feature of iTunes which allows you to compile selections to your liking (e.g. all songs from a certain band with a given rating). You can then choose which of these lists are going to be loaded on your player. You can compile one or several intelligent lists for your core collection.


You might want to consider to create a list that contains all songs not played since a certain period of time, e.g. 183 days - i.e. for half a year. If you create and upload that list, then iTunes will automatically offload all songs heard since the last time (unless another list will have it on your player) and upload all songs which are now additionally due to be uploaded to your player.

I hope this helps. The main effort is the initial setup: "import" the music, rate it to your liking, generate the dynamic lists, adding CD covers (not really needed but looks really good), .... The rests works by itself. Have fun! :cool:

I have a friend who has a mammoth music collection. I'm talking 14,000 or more ripped CDs. He was thinking about a 64 gig Touch for its video and music capacity, but was looking for an option which would automatically rotate music on his iPOD. He wants to designate a core collection of favorite albums as permanent and shuffle in and out the other stuff. Is there any programs out there for the PC which can do this? (Does iTunes itself support this?). He is looking for something that is pretty much automatic after it is programmed up. Just "dock and swap."

in itunes, make several smart playlists that randomly pick some number of songs based on whatever criteria he wants. for instance, he could have a playlist of 100 songs of 60's music and another that is 50 instrumentals. he probably will want a playlist of 150 songs least recently played or with the lowest playcount. the numbers are just an example, any number he wants will work (assuming all of it will fit on the ipod).

for his favourites, he could use a smart playlist (e.g., must have a 5 * rating) or a standard playlist of selected songs that he can change manually. since he can rate the music on the ipod, a smart playlist based on ratings or play count will change next time he syncs the ipod.

the smart playlists can be as simple or as complex as he wants, they can be limited to a certain number or contain all songs that match and he can have as many of them as he wants.

then when he docks and syncs, itunes will automatically update the music.