Automatically cycle songs on your iPod or iPhone

If you, like me, just have music you can listen to everyday, all day and any time. But you want diversity at the same time. You can easily solve the problem of manually picking music and spending hours and hours to make playlists with smart playlists

In iTunes click the File Menu and click New Smart Playlist. You’ll see a screen pop up where you can set the rules for your playlist. Obviously the rules i use may differ to your wishes but you’ll get the idea.

As you can see i have set some rules for a cycle. Also i exclude some things because i don’t want the very long mixes or radio entries on my iPhone. To prevent hearing the same songs over and over i have selected to only include tracks that have not been played in the past 4 days. So if i play a track today i’m sure i won’t hear it in the next 4 days. Also i don’t want video files in the playlist so the file must be audio. I want the playlist to be no bigger than 3GB because my iPhone has a lot of other data and i don’t want to tangle up the space and get warnings about not having enough space.

And voila. Now every time you sync your iPod or iPhone it will automatically put the songs matching that playlist on your device. You can include other playlists for the songs you absolutely want on your device no matter what. But that’s up to you!