Back in the CD era, it was easy to keep my wife's music collection separated from my own. We kept my CDs on one side of the shelf and her CDs on the other side, and the few CDs we both enjoyed would sit somewhere in the middle. The territorial lines were easy to maintain, and for the most part, music was never an issue in our house.
In the MP3 era, however, everything's become more complicated. We have a central home computer that hosts our collective iTunes music library. Unfortunately, the CD shelf system we've relied on for years doesn't translate on the computer. Her Tori Amos and Fiona Apple are right up next to my Squarepusher and Black Keys, and our iPods don't include a "his and her" music feature.
Granted, we could have made separate user profiles on our PC with individual iTunes music libraries, but that would make it hard to share the music we have in common. We also considered setting up our iPods to manually sync music instead of syncing automatically, but neither of us have the time to carefully groom our iPod's music collection and the extra step of manually ejecting our iPods each day can be a pain. We just want our shelf back.
Fortunately, I found a solution that worked for us. By setting up a couple of Smart playlists, we made iTunes intelligent enough to reliably keep the worst parts of her music collection off my iPod, and vice-versa. Unlike typical playlist techniques, which create lists of music you enjoy, the beauty of this system is that it works off the music you hate — which is much more fun. If you're interested, I've put together a step-by-step slideshow on how it's all done.
If you've got your own method of maintaining peace with multiple iPods and a communal iTunes music library, help us all out by sharing it in the comments section.
When you connect your iPod or iPhone to your computer, click on your device from the left pane and you'll see that iTunes offers some basic controls over personalisation. You can choose exactly what photo libraries, music playlists, podcasts, videos, and contact data you want to automatically sync to your particular iPod, as well as what content you want to ignore.
Unfortunately, there's no iPod checkbox that will automatically detect which music in your iTunes library belongs to you, and which music belongs to someone else. You can add this function, however, in the following four steps.
First make a standard playlist of all the music in your family's iTunes collection that you never want to hear on your iPod. For mine, I'll call it "Donald's Don't List."
Now, let's make a second playlist, this time a Smart playlist I'm calling "Donald's iPod," where the Playlist values exclude our "Don't list," as well as podcasts, and any music genres we know we don't like. You can add as many filters as you want by clicking the "+" symbol on the right side of each field.
If your iPod or iPhone can't hold much music, use the "Limit to" function underneath the filter list to generate a finite list of preferred songs that randomise each time you launch iTunes.
Both your playlists should appear in the column on your left. Check them out to make sure everything is working the way you want. If you find more bad music down the line, just add it to your "Don't List" and it will automatically be taken off your Smart playlist. If you discover a new genre that you want to filter out from your Smart list, just right-click the playlist, select edit, and make the necessary adjustments.
Finally, go back into your iPod's device window in iTunes (make sure your iPod is connected). Click on the music tab and set your iPod up to only sync music from the second playlist you created (the Smart playlist). Then, hit the "Apply" button in the lower right corner and celebrate your victory over your family's bad taste in music.
