iTuneMyWalkman 0.955

How the Script Works

iTuneMyWalkman will collect the specified iTunes playlists, which can be either regular or smart ones. It then sorts the playlists in alphabetical order, and gathers all the included tracks. It then deletes those tracks from the memory card that are not present in the iTunes playlists, and finally copies the missing tracks to the phone.

The alphabetical sorting can be used to control which songs are synchronized if your playlists are larger than the available space on the memory card. For example, I have the following setup:

A folder "iTuneMyWalkman" containing one regular and two smart playlists. "1. Other" is a regular playlist containing manually selected songs. "2. Newest" and "3. Most Played" are smart playlists containing 250 MB of the most recently added songs and 200 MB of the most often played songs.

What this means is that if I have manually selected some songs, I will always get those on the phone. After that, the remaining space is first filled first with 250 MB of the songs most recently added to my library, and then with the most often played songs.

If you would like to use a similar setup, you should do one additional thing besides setting up the playlists. Set a limit for the maximum size of the phone's music library. You can do this by choosing "iTMW - Preferences" from the Scripts menu in iTunes. I have the limit set to 450 MB, which leaves me about 20 MB free space for the pictures I take with the camera. If you do not set a limit, you might not get the tracks you wanted. Consider the following scenario with the playlist setup I am using:

1. Synchronize with an empty "1. Other" playlist. The phone is filled with tracks from the other two playlists.
2. Put some music to the playlist "1. Other" and synchronize. Because all the tracks on the phone are still on playlists that are being synchronized, they are not deleted from the phone. This might leave you with not enough free space to get all the songs from the playlist "1. Other" you wanted.

But if you do set a limit, iTuneMyWalkman will only gather that amount of tracks from its playlists, leaving some tracks out from the end of playlist "3. Most Played". Then those files will get deleted from the phone, and you will get the tracks you really wanted to.

The synchronization happens one way only, from computer to the phone. All songs that are on the phone's memory card, but not on iTMW's playlists will be deleted from the phone. Please keep this in mind if you are using the phone with more than one computer.

The playlists themselves are not synchronized, only the tracks within them. The files can be copied to artist/album folders or folders named after the playlists or the genre. Music bought from the iTunes Music Store is not uploaded as it cannot be played on the phone. Unchecked tracks and video files are not copied either.

The tracks can be re-encoded on the fly with either AAC or MP3 encoder. Currently you cannot set the encoder bit rate and iTuneMyWalkman will use the bitrate selected in the iTunes preferences. I know this is a stupid limitation and I am trying to find a way to set it from the script. I would like to note that iTunes saves the bit rate preferences separately for each encoder, and this way you can have two different bit rates selected if you use different encoders for iTunes and the phone. So if you normally use AAC to import music to your library, you can have the AAC bit rate set to whatever you like for your iTunes collection. Then you can set the MP3 encoder bit rate to whatever you would like to have on your phone. Then just tell iTuneMyWalkman to use the MP3 encoder while copying songs to your phone. I suggest that you turn off the "Play songs while importing" option in iTunes. Otherwise the tracks will be played when iTuneMyWalkman is converting them.

Another option is to create a directory structure representing the iTuneMyWalkman playlists in iTunes. An "artist" called iTuneMyWalkman will be created, and all playlists will appear as separate "albums" of that artist.