how to create smart playlists for your Zune
The Smart Playlists feature of iTunes has been around for quite some time, and it’s the only way I’m able to successfully manage the 9,000 songs that I currently have on my iPod.
With my Zune arriving on Wednesday, I figured it was time for me to put the question to rest - will the Zune support smart playlists? Although Gizmodo said in their first review of the Zune that it wouldn’t support smart playlists, I discovered this wasn’t true after spending some quality time with the Zune software today.
It turns out that the Zune software has a fairly intuitive interface for creating dynamic playlists based on the metadata in your library. The feature is a little bit hidden (which is probably why it eluded the folks at Gizmodo), but it’s very easy to access.
To start creating your dynamic playlist, simply right-click the “playlists” section in the left navigation bar, and click “Create Auto Playlist”:
This brings up the “New Auto Playlist” window, where you can set the options for the playlist. The new playlist defaults to “Music in my library” and allows you to add additional filters by clicking on one of the links in the window. There are tons of fields to choose from, including ratings (both yours and the Zune Marketplace ratings), play counts, and last played date.
There are also additional restrictions that allow you to limit the number of items, the duration, or the total size of the playlist:
What’s not really clear is whether the Zune will support dynamically updating playlists on the device. But fear not - Apple didn’t provide this feature immediately with the iPod, so even if Microsoft doesn’t include the ability for playlists to update themselves on the device at ship time, all hope is not necessarily lost.
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November 13th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
[…] Read how to do it here. […]
November 13th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Good old MS…I love how it doesn’t give you many options (and even less good ones). Take the “Date last played” restriction. You have two options “is before” and “is later than”, and then for durations, you have yesterday, 7 days, 30 days, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, and 5 years. How about just a free text box or the ability to put in a date?
Let’s compare the iTunes options for that same restriction: the first option has: “is,” “is not,” “is after,” “is before,” “is in the last,” “is not in the last,” and “is in the range.” And after that you have infinite choices through text boxes to tweak to your heart’s content.
And then there’s the fact that Album names, song titles, and etc. autocomplete as you type making it even easier to set up.
November 13th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
Yuck. Tron32, you are absolutely correct. I didn’t look at how bad the choices are in this list. And it turns out that you can’t even make these values more customized in the underlying XML file (zpl). I’m hoping that some smart person figures out how to hack away nicely at this, because it makes me sad that we’re potentially not going to get the functionality that iTunes offers. Grrr. Time to start logging feature requests!
November 26th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
I got my Zune and have been loading it with music, pictures and video. The interface is fine and seems to work without a lot of hassel.
However, I may not be the one to really comment on the Zune. Iaa I want to do is listen to music, view some videos and see some pictures (and listen to the radio). I don’t need playlists and I certainly can’t manage 9,000 songs + in any coherent fashion on a mp3 player.
I will leave that till I get my Bose 38 home theater up and running.
As far as rating the songs goes - with 9,000 songs and millions to pick rom the market place - (not to mention what we get from friends and other online sorces) why should anything on my mp3 player be less than a 4 star song?
Also, with 9,000 songs, assuming you listen to a 3 minute song, you would need 57 days or so to listen once - that dosn’t include songs you gott hear that are sent to you by friends or new releases by your favorite artist.
This player does the job of playing the music and transfering files Just Fine.
I never had an Ipod so comparisons to it are useless to me.
I don’t think that MS expectsw the IPod crew to throw down their IPods and run to MS. There are millions of new buyers entering into the markletplace - that’s their target.
Now if it is durable and software upgrades extend the devices utility - then I think it will do just fine.
Dwight