Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Here is the scenario: you have a six CD audio book that you rip into iTunes. You then select all the tracks in the resulting enormous Album in iTunes and choose to Remember Position in each track, and you set the combined play count to zero.

You make a Smart Playlist for listening to the book, similar to the configuration shown above; each time you re-visit this playlist it picks up where you left off, and only shows the remaining unheard tracks. All fine and good.

But, the problem is that you also want to take the book with you, but the iPod that you use only has a limited capacity. Here’s the trick:

You can make a second Smart Playlist that refers to the first. This one is limited by size to whatever you can spare (in this case, 50MB). Now you set up your iPod to sync with the second Playlist.

When you’re at your Mac you can listen to either; they will automatically update each other. Why have two at all though? Why not just create the second 50MB Playlist? Well, the short Playlist is the slice off the top of the pile of files still to be heard; the long Playlist is the whole pile, which gives you more of a sense of how far there is to go.

Playlists can’t easily be duplicated or copied and then modified, but by using new Playlists that refer to existing ones you can make refined choices based on existing criteria.