Hint: Settings for MusicBrowser also determine if pick list can be used

In the settings you can configure which element hierarchy you want to browse in SmartPlaylist's  Music Browser (Menu > Settings, then scroll to the bottom to "MusicBrowser: Show / hide:").

At the moment these settings are also applied in the rule details for Composer, Grouping, Artist, Album and Title. So, if you have deactivated Composer and Grouping as in the example above, you will not be able to pick a composer or a grouping in the details for the Composer rule or Grouping rule, respectively, as the list will be empty.

So, at the moment (SmartPlaylist v7.3.1) you have to activate all levels in the Music Browser in order to use all the pick lists for Composer, Grouping, Artist, Album and Title.
(This was done to minimise waiting time to build the pick lists. But the new iPhones / iPads are now so fast that this is not required anymore.)

In the next version of SmartPlaylist this will no longer be necessary and you can configure the Music Browser as you want and still be able to pick Composer, Grouping, Artist, Album and Title.

Problem on iPhone 5 -- fixed

Currently (with v6.0 of SmartPlaylist) there is a problem on the iPhone 5: The toolbar at the bottom does not respond. This happens only on the iPhone 5 (taller screen) and only in portrait mode. In landscape mode it works fine also on the iPhone 5.

The fix will be out in about a week, hopefully.

UPDATE: Fix with version v6.0.1 is out now.

⊕⊖ 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.

New icon

Early warning: This is going to be the new icon for SmartPlaylist:

It looks much more distinctive, simpler and easier to recognize and scales nicely for all sizes and resolutions.

UPDATE: If the icon is not updated when updating to SmartPlaylist v6.0:

1. Delete SmartPlaylist on your device -- unfortunately, this will delete all the rules and settings :-(
2. Re-install SmartPlaylist (via iTunes sync or via App Store > Updates > Purchased)

Copy / Paste rules

In the tools menu (⌘) there are the 2 commands "Save current rules" and "Load saved rules". They act like Copy / Paste to copy the rules from one playlist (say A) to another playlist (say B). (In the next version of SmartPlaylist they will be named "Copy current rules" / "Paste copied rules" to clarify their purpose).

The rules of a playlist are (only) saved when the query is started with "Enter" (⏎), so that you can always see what is actually "inside" the list. So, if you change the rules and switch to another playlist without using  "⏎", then those changes are not saved.

Corrupted AppStore download

There was / is also a problem some users have experienced: After downloading the latest version of SmartPlaylist (v5.9) SmartPlaylist crashes when opened. The same problem exists also with other apps. The reason for this seems to be corrupted files from the AppStore.
I have submitted a small update (v5.9.1) to Apple more than 10 days ago (fixing sorting after fusion / mix), but it has not yet been published by Apple. They seem to be really busy ...

UPDATE: OK, v5.9.1 has just been published in the App Store. I hope everyone gets a good copy this time.

Problem with iOS 5 and shuffle mode

When you switch to shuffle mode in SmartPlaylist with iOS 5 you might experience some funny effects where the playback stutters (goes on and off). So far I have no explanation for this problem. With iOS 4 it works just fine.

UPDATE: OK, I think I have found a way to prevent this problem. Fix will come soon (v5.9.2)

Problem with SmartPlaylist v5.6 & v5.7 on iPad with iOS < 5.1

Due to a bug, SmartPlaylist v5.6 & v5.7 does not work on iPad with iOS less than 5.1.

What you can do to solve the problem:
Update your iPad to iOS 5.1 or wait for SmartPlaylist v5.8 (due to be out approx. on 25. April).

Support for iTunes Match in SmartPlaylist

Personally I cannot understand how you can entrust your dear music collection into the hands of Apple or Google, or anybody else. I want to do my own backups, my own syncs, I want to be master of my music.

Anyhow, there are SmartPlaylist customers who use iTunes Match. To help them a bit, two features will be in v5.3:

1. Songs up somewhere in the clouds, i.e. not (yet) stored on the device, will be shown in the list in grey instead of in white (see screenshot below)
2. Downloading a song to the device for listening will no longer trigger the message "MPMediaLibrary Notification" (see other posts)

In the above example title #25 and #28 are greyed, because they are DRM-protected. Titles in the cloud will (should) also be displayed like that.

Please report your experience with iTunes Match and SmartPlaylist to support.smartplaylist@gmail.com.

UPDATE: At the moment (v5.9) the features described above no longer work. With iOS 6 it will be possible to filter songs that are in the cloud or those which are not (stored on the device). I will add this filter as a search rule in an upcoming version of SmartPlaylist.

New in v5.3: Empty cache after sync

So far SmartPlaylist automatically switched to the rules page and emptied the cache whenever the MediaLibrary was changed by a sync. With iTunes Match this is rather annoying, because each time a song is downloaded from the cloud to listen to it on the device, this happened.
So now, with v5.3 nothing will happen in SmartPlaylist when the MediaLibrary changes (for whatever reason). As long as you add new titles, everything is OK, you don't need to do anything in SmartPlaylist. But once you change some attributes (like lyrics, genre, composer, cover artwork, etc.) you need run "Empty cache after sync" to make sure that the new values are used in SmartPlaylist.

The reason behind this is that SmartPlaylist stores certain values, which take time to get, in a cache, in order to speed up search and display. This happens with the hierarchical browser (Genre>Composer>Groupings>Artists>Albums>Titles), the cover artwork (for the list view only), the lyrics and the realeaseDate.

So whenever you think that SmartPlaylist does not take the latest values, it is time to "Empty cache after sync". On older devices with iOS 4, where apps don't run in the background and have to be restarted each time, this is not necessary, since like that SmartPlalyist is always started with an empty cache.

If you still don't see what you expect, then probably there is a problem with syncing/iCloud/iTunes Match.

iTunes Match

SmartPlaylist relies completely on the MediaLibrary present on the device and has not been adapted to iTunes Match, if this is possible at all. Other developers are also struggling with this.

Accessing a song up in the cloud (iTunes Match) seems to change something in the MediaLibrary. Unfortunately I cannot distinguish between these Match-changes and real library changes after synching. Maybe I just have to ignore changes and people have to restart SmartPlaylist after synching, like before. Alas, Apple does not make it easy.

Remember: Some handy hidden functions

If you have studied this blog and read all release notes, then you should already be familiar with these tricks:

1. In all list views (in all apps, by the way): Tap on the status bar at the very top of the screen (e.g. on the time) to scroll to the top of the list.
2. On the main rules screen of SmartPlaylist: Tap on "X: N rules" (e.g. "A: 3 rules") at the very bottom to show / hide inactive rules (same as "Show only active rules" / "Show all rules" in the tools menu "⌘")
3. In SmartPlaylist's result list: Tap on "SmartPlaylist X: N" (e.g. "SmartPlaylist B: 39") at the top of the list to refresh the display of play count and last played (or the rating, after having changed it in the built-in music app) -- in most cases this happens automatically, but with this trick you can enforce screen refresh.
4. On the "Now Playing" screen: Tap on the time already played on the left or on the time remaining on the right of the playback time slider to pause / play the current song.

So now you know.

Empty list in "Limits"?

If the list of selection options on the "Limits" page is empty

then you need to restart SmartPlaylist. Please shut down SmartPlaylist in the Multitask bar:

If you know how to reproduce this problem, please report it to Support.SmartPlaylist@gmail.com.

Remember: After syncing it is always best to restart SmartPlaylist.

What is "⌘" and "⌥"?

Those 2 symbols are used on Apple keyboards.

Features different from other keyboards include:
The Command key (⌘)
The Option key (⌥)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Keyboard

So, that's why I use those 2 symbols in SmartPlaylist:
⌘ for different commands (tools)
⌥ for different options to load a list

Bug with (corrupted?) artwork

There are some songs with a kind of corrupted artwork in them, which make SmartPlaylist crash. Reason: The artwork has a size of 0 by 0 pixels. With v4.9 SmartPlaylist will detect that and treat it as "no artwork".

Workarounds:
Add "real" artwork
Create new mp3 from "corrupt" song

Comments work again in iOS 4.3 beta 2

It seems that Comments again can be used in iOS 4.3 (beta 2). Let's hope that it will stay like that.

Problems with iOS 4.2.1

With iOS 4.2.1 comments are no longer visible!

So, you will not be able to search or sort by comments in SmartPlaylist, since all comments are now "missing" on the device.

I have reported this bug to Apple. (This now makes 10 open bugs I have reported to Apple. Instead of fixing them, they add more bugs ...)

Here's my balance:

Used to work with iOS 4.1, but no longer work with 4.2.1:

• DiscNumber, DiscCount
• Comments
• BeatsPerMinute

Never worked:

• UserGrouping

Doesn't work properly:

• ReleaseDate (does not seem to work for dates before 2000)
• Lyrics (works only if the lyrics were displayed in iPod music app before)
• LastPlayedDate (wrong time zone when set on device, is shifted when syncing)

Problem with v4.2 - fixed with v4.3

There was a problem in v4.2: The list view crashed, when there was a song which did not have an album artwork.

Workaround: Deactivate the list view (in settings)

The fix for this problem has been published with v4.3.

Sorry for this annoyance!

The power of SmartPlaylist rules

The rules in SmartPlaylist are really flexible and powerful. They could also be called "search criteria", "search conditions" or "filter". They tell SmartPlaylist which titles you WANT, discarding all the rest. It will give you only those songs that meet ALL the rules.

Example 1:
Let's say we want all the blues songs we have --> we will specify the rule "Genre contains 'Blues'":

Knowing that the other genres we have are 'Rumba', 'Jazz' and 'Tango', we could just say "Genre contains 'bl'", or also "Genre contains 's'" - because only 'Blues' contains 'bl' or 's' (the search is case-insensitive). It's like saying "Genre = *bl*", where * could be anything.

Example 2:
Here we have 4 rules, so only the following songs are returned:

IF

1) artist contains 'alasd'

AND IF

2) genre contains 'folk' OR 'altern'

AND IF

3) the song is in a playlist containing 'new' (e.g. 'New stuff')

AND IF

4) the song has 0, 3, 4, or 5 stars

 Some remarks on rule 2:

• "contains 'altern'" is like "*altern*", so you get e.g. "Alternative"
• here "OR" was used to get folk and alternative songs together
• if you had used "folk AND altern", the result list would (most likely) have been empty, since no song has a genre containing both 'folk' and 'altern' at the same time (unless you have songs with genre e.g. 'Folk / Alternative')
• the logical operators " OR " and " AND " must always be written in capital letters
• you can also use "NOT " --> e.g. if you want all songs which are NOT blues
• you can also use " BUT NOT " which is logically the same as " AND NOT " --> example: "Artist contains 'john BUT NOT cash'" returns all songs from artists named "John", "Johnny", etc., but not those from "Johnny Cash"

Feature reminder: Enlarge cover artwork

You can tap on the cover artwork to enlarge it to the main screen (single tap) or to full screen (with a double tap):

The artwork is synced to the iPhone / iPod Touch with only 320x320 pixels. Artwork which is not quadratic is made to fit within 320x320 pixels, adding black bands (which SmartPlaylists cuts off) - so it can look blurry when enlarging it.

UPDATE: With iOS 5 the cover artwork is synced to the device in full size. With SmartPlaylist v5.4 you can also use the pinch gesture to enlarge the artwork.