In case it’s not obvious from my recent posts I’ve purchased an iPhone. Even though the phone has a bunch of great features, I was concerned that I wouldn’t have enough disk space to get rid of my iPod. I have roughly half of the drive space (going from a 30Gb iPod to a 16Gb iPhone). My personal collection of music is around 20Gb so my iPod had enough space to sync everything automatically. With only 16Gb on the iPhone, though, I now have to manually manage my music. For those who have the 8Gb version, I’m sure it’s even more drastic.

I thought this manual process was going to be a drag, however I discovered a setup that is fairly low maintenance. I created two playlists in iTunes and configured the iPhone to sync with them instead of All Songs. These are not playlists for listening, rather they’re only used for syncing purposes.

The first is a regular playlist called “iPhone” and I drag my essential albums here that I always want to have with me. The second playlist is a “smart playlist.” If you haven’t used the smart playlist feature, it’s basically a filtered search result that functions as a playlist. My smart playlist is configured to include the most recently added 5Gb of music. I have a few filters to make sure it is only music and not podcasts and video (see screenshot).

This setup is pretty nice because my essentials always synced and I can change them as needed by editing the playlist. The most recent music that I’ve bought is synced automatically without me doing anything. It makes sense because I would usually want to listen to the stuff that I’ve just added. The iPhone only syncs one copy of each song so duplicates are not a problem.

If you have any tips or tricks for managing your own music, please feel free to post a comment.

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