Autofill Music On Your iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch with iTunes

 

Autofill Music On Your iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch with
iTunes

While I keep my 5th generation iPod filled to capacity and use it
solely as a music player in my car, I can’t stuff 20 gigs of audio files
on my iPhone 3G. And having the same set of selected songs on my iPhone
can get a little stale, especially when I don’t sync the device for
several months.


So in order to rotate different music on my iPhone, I’ve started
using the Autofill feature of iTunes, which is somewhat hidden in the
iPhone and iPod Touch setup. It takes a few clicks to find the settings.
But here’s how to get it done. (Note: this process is
different for 1st or 2nd generation iPod shuffle users. Autofill for
those devices are clearly evident.)


The purpose and benefit of Autofill is to have iTunes automatically
add and/or replace songs on your portable Apple music playing device
rather than you having to manually select playlists from your iTunes
library. It also gives you the ability to determine how much memory you
want devoted to songs on your device. This is crucial if your iTunes
library is very large and all your songs can’t fit on your device. So
you may decide that each time you sync your device with iTunes that you
want to Autofill it with say 3-4 gigs of music.


First off, in order to use Autofill, you
need to manually manage your music on your iPod (when I say iPod, I‘m
also referring to the iPhone and iPod Touch.) So when you connect your
iPod to iTunes ‘09 for syncing, you’ll want to select the device in
iTunes and click the “Manually manage music and videos” box
under Options.

Next, you want to select Music under Devices, which
will show all your music in iTunes. From there, you have a few
important decisions to make. First off, you need to decide if you want
Autofill to choose music from your entire iTunes Music library or if you
want it to select from a particular playlist of songs. Click on “Autofill
From” at the bottom of the main iTunes window and make your
selection.

Now click on the Settings button on the right side. This is
where it gets somewhat tricky. Where it says, “Reserve space for
disk use,” is a little confusing. You want to first decide how much
memory space you want left (reserved) on your iPod after Autofill adds
music to your device.


In other words, say you want about 311 megabytes of free space for
new applications, videos, podcasts, etc, then you will want to set the “Reserve
space disk use” slider to that amount. In my test, the numbers
didn’t always match up, but they were fairly close. When I set the
number to 311.3 MB, it filled my iPhone with 4.56 GB of songs, and left
about 365.1 MB of free space for other stuff. That’s okay, because I
don’t add as many apps and video files as I used to. I just want to make
sure I have a good variety of songs from my all jazz playlist. If video
files and podcasts are your primary media use for your device, then you
might allot a gig or more of free space.

Lastly, you need to decide if Autofill will do the following:


• Replace all items when Autofilling (It will mainly replace all
songs, not other stuff.)


• Choose items randomly.


• Choose higher rated items more often.


I chose all three.  Simple. If you don’t select “Choose items
randomly“, you will not be able to select “Choose higher rated
items more often.”


After making selections, click OK and go back to the start
page of your device and click Sync. Autofill will do its thing.

If the changes you make don’t come out as you wish, don’t worry; you
can always revert back to the previous setup of selected playlists.

So how do you prefer to update your iPod? Manually with selected
playlists or automatically Autofilled?