Ackey emailed me today complaining that he’d exceeded his iPod capacity. He wants to know how best to keep it sync’d without missing out on the music he wants to listen to.

Personally I discard iTunes automatic management (because that involves trusting technology, and iTunes at that) and discard manual management because I lose the ability to sync Play Counts and send updates to Last.FM (and because it’s tedious).

My weapon of choice is Smart Playlists. Incredible little devices in any case, formidable with practice and inexplicably absent from the feature-set of Microsoft’s new Zune player. Yes, there’s a little tweaking to get set up (especially as you try to fill your capacity optimally) but it’s well worth it.

So, my iPod is set to Sync only with ‘Selected Playlists’, and those playlists are as follows:

• ‘iPod Picks’ – One common-or-garden regular static playlist. Into here I manually place any and all music that I always want to have on me. Radiohead’s back-catalogue is in here, as is that of Gomez.
• ‘New Music’ – Nice and easy Smart Playlist. Selects all music added to my iTunes Library in the past two weeks.
• ‘Newish’ – Rather like ‘New Music’, but for music added in the period of 2–6 weeks. You may ask “Why?”. You’d be wise to. It’s more to do with my iTunes habits: I like to shuffle my ‘new’ and ‘newish’ music separately.
• ‘Recently Played’ – The iTunes staple. I’ve edited to limit the playlist to 1000 songs.
• ‘Most Played’ – My all time 100 most played tracks.
• ‘Year: 2006’ – Fairly self explanatory. I’ve got one of these for most recent years and includes all music released this year. I also use this in December when formulating review-of-the-year posts.
• ‘Indie 500’ – 500 (duh) tracks which are rated higher than ★★★ and ordered by rating. All my ★★★★★ tracks get selected.
• ‘Top Class 100’ – This used to have a witty name, but then I upped the track count to 100 and it didn’t work any more. No matter. This again selects songs rated greater than ★★★, but this time picks them by ‘Least Often Played’, so the selection will be subtly different to the above, and hopefully pick some rarities.
• ‘Lost Songs’ – This is mint; selects 300 songs not played in the last five months. Then, although I vary these restrictions a bit, it excludes songs rated ★ or ★★ (but allows songs with no rating at all) and I’ve embraced iTunes 7 new ‘Skip Count’ feature so anything skipped 3 times drops off the list too (after all, it’s easier to skip a track than mark it with a low rating on the iPod. Although I’m not sure if the 4G iPods actually update the Skip Count or not).

Finally, there are a handful of other static playlists that go on; Podcast and compilation CD playlists I’ve created for various people, for example.

And that, at the present time, results in an iPod with 2024 tracks on it, with 400 meg to spare.

If you set up this way you’ll need to spend some time tweaking the track limits, since everyone has a different combination of file sizes (mine are generally quite high bit-rate). If you have busy months acquiring new music you’ll push over capacity and need to reduce the track count on another playlist (‘Recently Played’ is usually first choice for trimming), but on the whole it’s a very stable set-up.

How do you cue yours?