<p>I have added my Christmas songs to my Itunes library and put them all in a playlist. Can I add this playlist as a whole entity to my ipod shuffle and keep it intact and not have it shuffle in to my other music??? I apologize for my lack of knowledge and grrr…neither of my Ds are home to help or answer my questions! Thanks for your kindness and help!</p>
<p>Yes. You can just “sync” and entire playlist to your iPod. When your iPod is plugged in to the computer, click on the iPod in iTunes. Then click MUSIC in the iPod window and you can choose which playlists to sync. Just sync your XMAS playlist.</p>
<p>How it shuffles depends. If you go to PLAYLISTS on your iPod and just shuffle that playlist, then it will only play XMAS songs. If you go to a different playlist and shuffle that one, then it won’t include XMAS songs. If you just hit “shuffle songs” from the iPod main menu, then it will shuffle everything, including XMAS songs. That’s why I always have a separate playlist, even for my main listening.</p>
<p>Thanks for the reminder. I’ve got to put the Bob Dylan Christmas album on my iPod. That should be great for Airdyne intervals and burpees!</p>
<p>I was afraid of that. The Christmas music is on a playlist but everything else is just on there. Is there an easy/quick way to convert all of my other music to a playlist so it won’t shuffle in the Christmas music???</p>
<p>What I do is just create an smart playlist “Exercise Playlist” that has “x” number of songs selected at random from the larger library. Then, I just shuffle that playlist. Smart playlists let you create automatic rules. Once you play around with them, you’ll get the idea.</p>
<p>For example, the one I use most has:</p>
<p>A) only songs with my name in the GROUPING</p>
<p>B) only songs I’ve rated 5-stars</p>
<p>C) only songs where the MEDIA KIND is “music”, so it doesn’t get podcasts and workout mp3s.</p>
<p>D) only songs that haven’t been played in the last 12 months I adjust this to keep several hundred songs in the universe</p>
<p>E) select 25 songs from the above universe at random. This gives me about 2 hours of music, selected at random. I just select this playlist.</p>
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<p>I could skip step E and just tell the iPod to shuffle this playlist. But, when I select a playlist for the NIKE+IPOD, it plays it in artist name order and won’t shuffle. Thus, STEP E is a workout to create a random shuffle playlist for walking.</p>
<p>If you just create some kind of generic master playlist, you will be able to shuffle that without your XMAS songs being mixed in.</p>
<p>BTW, you could just select all the songs in your XMAS playlist, click GET INFO and make them all “HOLIDAY” genre. Then, your master playlist could be a smart playlist that is as simple as “GENRE DOES NOT INCLUDE HOLIDAY” and “MEDIA KIND DOES NOT INCLUDE PODCAST”. That will give you all of your other music in a smart playlist for shuffling.</p>
<p>That sounds good but…ummm… where is get info???</p>
<p>Select a song or a bunch of songs, then you can find “GET INFO” under the FILE menu at the top or you can right-click and GET INFO will be one of the options.</p>
<p>HOLIDAY is one of the pre-defined genres, so you can just select it from the GENRE drop-down box in the GET INFO window. CHRISTMAS would, of course, not be a politically correct genre, so you would have to manually type that in the box!</p>
<p>Ok…figured out how to make them all Holiday. Now how to make everything else on smart playlist…???</p>
<p>Under the FILE MENU, select NEW SMART PLAYLIST. </p>
<p>We’ll start with a very simple one with just one ‘rule’. In the first box of the “rule” (it probably says “artist”, select GENRE from the drop down list. Change the second box to “IS NOT” from the list. Type “Holiday” in the third box.</p>
<p>Now, you have one rule. GENRE IS NOT HOLIDAY. Make sure live updating is checked. Click OK to save the playlist. You can see the new smart playlist over on the left. You can edit the name by clicking it or right click to choose EDIT SMART PLAYLIST to change it.</p>
<p>When you are editing, you can add additional rules by clicking the + sign to the right of the last rule. You can just keep adding rules.</p>
<p>Rules let you do all sorts of fun things. Makes it easy to do an Elvis playlist. Or a playlist of songs I haven’t heard in 12 months. Or a playlist of the last 50 songs played so I can go back and see what that song was I didn’t recognize while I was walking. Or the one that I wanted to remove from my 5-star rating playlist because it wasn’t that good. The great thing about smart playlists is that they automatically update. If I change a rating, that song automatically drops off any playlists I have with a 5-star rule. As soon as I play a song, it drops off my “haven’t heard it in 12 months” playlist.</p>
<p>Do you have an actual ipod shuffle or a regular ipod that you like to shuffle? Do playlists stay intact on those little shuffles?
And interesteddad, thanks for the tutorial!</p>
<p>Thanks idad! Will play with this today. Your info is perfect and easy to follow!! You are the best! :)</p>
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<p>I’ve never used a shuffle, so I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think there’s any way that playlists could be selected on a shuffle in this way. You could use playlists and smart playlists in iTunes to select the music to load on your shuffle (whatever rules you like plus a rule that limits the size of the smart playlist to “X” megabytes (matching your shuffle size) selected at random from the songs matching the other rules. I’ve always loaded my iPods that way, with a Smart Playlist rule that includes only 5-star rated songs with my name in the GROUPING (as opposed to just my wife’s name). This way, I don’t get 3-star songs or Amy Winehouse and my wife doesn’t get ZZTOP or the White Stripes.</p>
<p>BTW, Apple broke some Smart Playlist features on the iPod a couple generations ago and has never fixed them. So sometimes you will find certain Smart Playlist rules that simply don’t work on the iPod, even though they work on iTunes. For example, if I limit my “over 12 months” playlist to 25 songs at random, it works perfectly both places giving me exactly 25 songs (90 to 120 minutes). If I, instead limit it to “2 Hours”, it works perfectly on iTunes, but gives me several hundred songs on the iPod, i.e. the 2 Hour limit is broken on the iPod. Just keep Apple’s flaky software in mind as you experiment with Smart Playlists. Sometimes it’s **not **you.</p>
<p>I have a nano, and you can shuffle within the playlists. It’s pretty old.</p>
<p>I don’t know anything about SMART playlists. As far as I know I just have a dumb one, that I put together several years ago. I clearly ought to spend sometime with my software.</p>
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<p>Apple software kills brain cells. Plus, iPod smart playlists only work if you are wearing skinny jeans, have a nose ring, and call everyone, “doood”.</p>
<p>One comment I’d like to throw in is that we call the holiday “Christmas” in my house. We have a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree. We tell people our kids are on “Christmas break” rather than winter break.</p>
<p>So our iPod has a genre called “Christmas” rather than holiday, because we listen to Christmas music! </p>
<p>(You can list the genre as anything you want, even “afasdjklas” if you desired.)</p>