⊕⊖ Exclude/Include tutorial

Yesterday I downloaded 4 songs from the iTunes Store. Then I synced them to my iPhone. Then I discovered that each song was copied twice to the iPhone:

1. One copy was OK (artwork, rating, playable)
2. The other copy was "empty" / corrupt: no artwork, not playable, NOT DELETABLE!!!

In iTunes it just shows the 4 songs on my iPhone ("iPhone4"):

But on the iPhone I actually do have those corrupted duplicates:

... and I can NOT DELETE THEM on the iPhone!!!

Maybe I could erase all music on the iPhone and re-sync it. But unlike the music app, SmartPlaylist can do the following trick: You can hide (exclude) certain songs from one or all playlists.

You just navigate to the details of the undesired song (here: one of the 4 corrupted duplicates) and tap "⊕⊖":

In the pop-up dialogue you just tap on the playlist  A / B / C ... or F where the selected song should be excluded.

1. With the first tap you get "⊕" (e.g. "A⊕"), i.e. "Include in A" -- like that you can manually add songs to a playlist
2. With the second tap you get "⊖" (e.g. "A⊖"), i.e. "Exclude from A" -- like that you can manually hide (exclude) songs from a playlist (or from multiple or from all playlists).

Those excludes/includes are shown as a rule for each playlist:

With the blue/white ">" you can manage them:

• Delete all (red button at the bottom)
• Change playlists and/or ⊕ or ⊖

To apply the excludes/includes you have to requery the playlist with "⏎". As long as you don't use "⏎", songs with "⊖" are still in the list, but they are skipped and not played.

The 3 steps:

1. That's what I got at first in my "Saban" playlist:

 2. Then I marked them for excluding (as described above):

3. Then I ran the search again with "⏎" and was free of those 4 undesired duplicates:

So, that's how you can manually add or hide individual songs from one, multiple or all your playlists.

Dilemma

With the arrival of iOS 6 & iPhone 5 I can

1. either keep supporting iOS 4.1 and iPodTouch 2 (2nd generation) -- but without full support for iPhone 5
2. or abandon iPodTouch 2, only support iOS 4.3 or greater -- with full support for iPhone 5

(Apple gives me no other options)

I chose 2. Sorry, no more updates for the iPodTouch 2nd generation -- i.e. DON'T update to the next version  of SmartPlaylist (v6.0) if you have an iPodTouch 2 or a device still with iOS 4.1!

The program code of SmartPlaylist has no problem with iOS 4.1 / iPodTouch 2, it's only Apple's development and distribution tools which force me to cut off support for older devices.

The way it looks now I can only support the following hardware (with iOS 4.3 or higher):

• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 4, iPhone 4S
• iPhone 5
• 3rd and 4th generation iPodTouch
• All iPads

(I do not own all these devices, so I can test only a few of them: iPhone 4, iPad 1, iPodTouch 4)