Autofill - how to make a big deal out of nothing at all

Ceroc Addict

Ceroc Addict

Registered
It took a couple of days for this to click with me - Autofill has been in iTunes for ages.

It's just a severely crippled version of a smart playlist!

Kap
 
But the point is, it's been optimized for use with the iPod Shuffle, and for new users to use brainlessly.
Sure, you can make a fairly passible alternative to Party Shuffle using smart playlists too. But no one will argue that was a bad feature addition...
 
dlloyd said:
But the point is, it's been optimized for use with the iPod Shuffle, and for new users to use brainlessly.
Sure, you can make a fairly passible alternative to Party Shuffle using smart playlists too. But no one will argue that was a bad feature addition...
Click to expand...
Actually, I would make the argument that they are bad feature additions.

Why?

  1. Because the programmer time/effort spent on Autofill and Party Shuffle could (should) have just gone directly into making Smart Playlists more effective.
  2. Because they add needless clutter to the iTunes user interface.
Kap

P.S. Some ways Smart Playlists could be made substantially better:
  • Allow some kind of intelligent ordering of the smart playlist. e.g. Be able to say "Put these 4 audible books at the top of the playlist and fill the rest with random music". This functionality alone would have been greatly superior to Autofill.
  • Allow boolean operators between terms and not just over the whole.
  • Allow the smart playlist to be automatically refilled once the end has been reached (this is essentially what Party Shuffle is)
 
Ceroc Addict said:
Actually, I would make the argument that they are bad feature additions.

Why?

  1. Because the programmer time/effort spent on Autofill and Party Shuffle could (should) have just gone directly into making Smart Playlists more effective.
  2. Because they add needless clutter to the iTunes user interface.
Kap
Click to expand...
I agree that it might have made sense to spend the time otherwise, but that doesn't mean that they are 'bad features'. My understanding was that the Autofill only comes up when you connect an iPod Shuffle, and the party shuffle idea is a very sound one. Admittedly I don't have a whole lot of use for such a thing, seeing as I never host parties, but on the whole, I think it is a good addition.

P.S. Some ways Smart Playlists could be made substantially better:
  • Allow some kind of intelligent ordering of the smart playlist. e.g. Be able to say "Put these 4 audible books at the top of the playlist and fill the rest with random music". This functionality alone would have been greatly superior to Autofill.
  • Allow boolean operators between terms and not just over the whole.
  • Allow the smart playlist to be automatically refilled once the end has been reached (this is essentially what Party Shuffle is)
Click to expand...
I think allowing too much individual control over the contents of the Smart Playlists would make things too complicated. Having the option to sort by type/genre/artist/name etc is already available, so I don't know how much more complexity is really necessary.
 
dlloyd said:
I think allowing too much individual control over the contents of the Smart Playlists would make things too complicated. Having the option to sort by type/genre/artist/name etc is already available, so I don't know how much more complexity is really necessary.
Click to expand...
I'd rather a Smart Playlist that was simple to set up, but then allowed you to do much more powerful things if you spent a nominal amount of time learning how.

Just browsing the internet, I've already seen several people state that they wished they could automatically put their books/podcasts at the top of their Autofill playlists.

Kap
 
So order it by genre so that Audio Books are at the top of the list. Or is that not possible?
 
dlloyd said:
So order it by genre so that Audio Books are at the top of the list. Or is that not possible?
Click to expand...
Not possible (at least not without a bit of fiddling - e.g. creating a genre "<space>Books and Spoken", just for sorting purposes).


Convert said:
Can someone explain the Autofill feature to me?
Click to expand...
When you plug in an iPod shuffle, you can hit the Autofill button in iTunes to fill it with a random selection of your music. i.e. It lets you fill the shuffle without having to think about it.

Kap
 
Ouch... no way would I let that happen. Sounds frustrating. I have 2000 songs and that's nothing compared to what most people have here. If they did that, and kept getting 240 songs they didn't want... it'd be annoying.
 
That's why you can sort of specify which songs to put on there -- your top ranked songs, most recently played songs, least recently played songs, etc. There are a few different options for AutoFill... you can even autofill from certain playlists.
 
Convert said:
Ouch... no way would I let that happen. Sounds frustrating. I have 2000 songs and that's nothing compared to what most people have here. If they did that, and kept getting 240 songs they didn't want... it'd be annoying.
Click to expand...
You can restrict the selection to a given playlist, or only select high rating songs. However, I still don't have any use for it (compared to Smart Playlists)

Kap
 
so does the shuffle do the shuffling on the fly or is it whatever the order is in the playlist after you click the shuffle button?

I can't wait to get the call to come pickup my shuffle. ordered the 512.
 
blue&whiteman said:
so does the shuffle do the shuffling on the fly or is it whatever the order is in the playlist after you click the shuffle button?
Click to expand...
?

There's no way of knowing - no screen.

Kap
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top