November 29, 2017

iOS 11: Problems with play count / last played, rating not syncing

Some users observe that when they have played a song in SmartPlaylist the play count / last played date are not updated. Some also say that the rating they do in SmartPlaylist is not synced to iTunes.

In all these cases it is iOS 11 which causes those problems. It is the Music app in the background which sets (or should set ...) the play count and last played date. But sometimes this does just not happen. SmartPlaylist can only read the values from the Music app. Also, if the rating does not sync to iTunes, it is a iOS 11 problem, since SmartPlaylist has nothing to do with the syncing process.

Personally, I had the play count and last played date problems only at the very beginning of iOS 11. After a while it got okay again, but I don't know when/why exactly. Make sure you update to the latest version of iOS 11.

July 17, 2017

Update lists before adding/subtracting/intersecting them

When you do list operations, i.e. adding/subtracting/intersecting other lists with a "parent" list, SmartPlaylist currently takes the last saved titles from them.
With the next version of SmartPlaylist there will be a new behaviour:
Lists will be automatically updated (loaded and saved) before adding/subtracting/intersecting them to/from/with the parent list. Like that you no longer need to go and reload them one by one before using them in a parent list.



Some hints about list operations:
  • If you do not specify any search rules SmartPlaylist will load ALL songs you have in your media library. Adding other lists to that will have no effect, of course.
  • If you want to have a list, say "A", just to add/subtract/intersect other lists, you have to specify an "impossible" rule like "Genre xyz" in "A" - this gives you an empty list to which you can add other lists
  • SmartPlaylist always first adds the "+" (add) lists, then subtracts the "-" (subtract) lists and finally intersects this result with the "=" (intersect) lists

June 12, 2017

Search with Safari from SmartPlaylist (v10.3.1)

"Search with Safari ..." proposes different search terms based on composer, title, artist, etc. which then are passed to Safari to search the Web (using your default search engine). One of the terms is for example "Lyrics <title>, <artist>" to quickly search for the lyrics of a song.

June 04, 2017

Search in iTunes Store from SmartPlaylist (v10.3)

Similar to "Load all titles with same ..." you can now use "Search in iTunes Store ..."

to get a list of search terms from the genre, composer, artist, artist/genre, album, album/artist, title and title/artist of the selected song. The one you pick will be sent to the iTunes Store app on your device, ...


where it is automatically used to search and show the results:


You can easily go back to SmartPlaylist (upper left) and redo it with a different search term.

May 30, 2017

Small update (v10.2)

This update of SmartPlaylist lets you easily rate the app itself after you use "Rate this title ..." in the detail view:

This is an Apple component (SKStoreReviewController). I hope it will not annoy you but rather make you give a high rating ... (thanks!)