iTunes: Each playlist needs a checkbox

Like individual songs, each playlist needs a checkbox to decide whether it gets sync’d to an iPod or not.

I have lots of playlists, only a few are relevant to my mobile listening needs. But I’m forced to scroll through a ton of playlists on my iPod to find the relevant ones.

iTunes: Podcast settings need to be per-subscription

It makes sense to have global (default) podcast settings. But you need to be able to override them per podcast subscription.

I’m talking about whether to download all new episodes, or only the most recent. And how many episodes to keep (all, all unplayed, or the most recent n).

I have some podcasts that I only want the most recent n (and n is different per-subscription!); others I want all unplayed. (I can see how some people would want to keep all episodes period.)

I always want to download all new episodes. Unless I happen to only retain the most recent one episode, in which case it’s equivalent, though unnecessary (and hence an unnecessary UI complication), to specify to download only the most recent.

This grates on me even more because the behavior is not solely dependent on the settings (like it should be), but also on whether you leave iTunes open all the time or not. Here’s what I mean: Configure iTunes to download only the most recent, and to retain the most recent 4. If you leave iTunes running all the time, you always have the most recent 4 published episodes. If, however, you only open iTunes once a week, and the podcast publishes daily, you’ll have 4 episodes, one from each of the 4 most recent weeks.

Currently I leave iTunes running all the time so I don’t miss things. This is frustrating because iTunes is such a computer resource hog that it slows down my system.

Is there any good here? iTunes does support per-subscription override for whether to auto-delete or not. That’s good.

iPod: If I wanted song titles sorted in album order, I would have viewed albums

In my iPod Nano I drill down through Music -> Songs and see all my songs sorted alphabetically by title. Good.

When I drill down through Music -> Albums -> All, I see all my songs sorted alphabetically by album order. OK; I can see that; especially since I can get an alphabetical list of all my songs using Music -> Songs.

When I drill down through Music -> Artists -> [Some Artist] -> All, I see all the songs by that artist sorted by album order. WTF?

How does it make sense that all songs for an artist are sorted in album order rather than alphabetical?

If I want to play all songs by an artist in album order, I can select play when positioned on Music -> Artists -> [Some Artist].

When I drill into [Some Artist] -> All, I’m trying to select a particular song. And when I do that for Jonathan Coulton, and see 74 songs sorted in album order, it takes me forever to slowly scroll to find a title.

Some would ask why I don’t just use Music -> Songs to select my song title. It turns out that searching though 1300 sorted songs takes about as long as searching through 74 unsorted songs …

iTunes: I told you, I’m done listening to that!

What the heck is the algorithm iTunes uses for auto-deletion of podcasts? It removes them from my iPod too soon and deletes them from iTunes too late (if ever).

Previously I explained how iTunes deletes podcasts from my iPod too soon. In some kind of cosmic balance, it also deletes them from my computer too late (sometimes never).

I swear I can’t figure out the algorithm. After a podcast is removed from my iPod Nano, it seems it almost always remains in my iTunes forever. However sometimes it gets removed after awhile. I thought it might be removed when it downloaded the next podcast in the subscription, but there appears to be no consistent rhyme or reason. (A very helpful posting is here. Although even with this understanding, I can’t get the behavior I want/expect.)

The behavior should be:

Asuming my iTunes podcast settings are to “keep all unplayed episodes” (as opposed to, e.g., the last 5 episodes): Once a podcast is correctly removed from my iPod, it should be removed from iTunes after a user defined delay in days. (Default should be one day.) This gives the user a chance for the oops factor. (Alternately it could be immediately moved to an iTunes recycle bin which would allow undelete.)

UPDATE (11/9/07):  Other people are experiencing this too.

iTunes: I’m not done listening to that!

What the heck is the algorithm iTunes uses for auto-deletion of podcasts? It removes them from my iPod too soon and deletes them from iTunes too late (if ever).

It should not remove podcasts from my iPod if either of the following is true:

• I’ve never started listening to it.
• The current position is not at the beginning.

I.e., if I start playing a podcast and pause it before the end, it should not get removed when I sync. Yet it does because apparently iTunes honors the first criteria, but not the second.

I listen back-and-forth to my podcasts; I’m always in the middle of one, typically several. Because of this, I have to wait to sync with iTunes until I force myself to finish up all my in-progress podcasts, and then refrain from starting a new one until I can get to my computer. This is not convenient. And it seems so frickin obvious that I gotta wonder how Apple missed this. (Come on, they’re way better at UI than everyone else. Is this on purpose?)

If I start listening to a podcast and decide I don’t want to finish it (ever), all I need do is skip it. Thus (a) I’ve started listening to it and (b) it is positioned (back) at the beginning; it is ok to delete.

UPDATE: I found a solution to this.