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.

Share This

[Update - I switched to IMAP instead of POP for connecting to my email server and it seems much better.  It also marks messages as "read" on the phone once I read them on my computer, which was a previously major annoyance.  I would recommend IMAP if it's available to you.]

I have my iPhone set to retrieve email messages from my POP3 account. This works great except that about every 10th message would show “This message has not been downloaded from the server” instead of the message text.

I discovered that this was not actually a problem with the iPhone, rather with my email setup. I also have Outlook on my desktop which is configured to remove messages from the server after downloading. What happens is that the iPhone downloads the headers but does not get the full message body until you actually read the message. Meanwhile, Outlook downloads all new messages and immediately removes them from the server. So when you try to read an email on the iPhone for the first time, it only has the headers and needs to retrieve the message body from the server. However if Outlook was opened then it probably removed the messages from the server. So there is no way for the iPhone to get the message body. It would make more sense if the error message on the iPhone was changed to “This message is no longer available on the server.”

There is a fairly simple work-around to this problem. Just configure your desktop email client so it doesn’t immediately remove messages after downloading. In my case using Outlook, there is a setting to leave mail on the server for X days (I set mine to 3 days). This resolved the issue for me entirely, however if I try to read an email on the iPhone that is more than 3 days old it won’t be available. Basically the number of days you configure your client to retain messages on the server is how far back they will be available via your iPhone. For me 3 days is plenty. However, if you want to have access to older messages you can set the retention to 30 days or whatever your email client and host will allow.

Share This