iPod: Copy To Play Order

January 17th, 2007

I’m very excited today .. I finally figured out how to reorder my playlists on my ipod. I’ve been using iTunes 7 on my macbook pro for a while, but could not figure this one thing out. I read numerous postings where people had the same problem i had – I reorder my iPod playlist on iTunes, but when i eject the iPod, the playlist order is still random. The only solution i found was to create a new playlist and drag each song to it one at a time in the order you want. Then remove the old playlist and rename the new one to old playlist name.

But today i found out what to do – pick the iPod playlist you want by clicking on it in the left pane of iTunes 7, reorder songs in your playlist how you want, sort on title/artist/album, and/or drag and drop how you want them. When you’re ready to save the playlist order to the iPod, goto the left pane, ctrl-click (or right-click) the iPod playlist (which should already be selected), choose “Copy To Play Order”.

EXAMPLE: Change “Favs” playlist to be sorted by album, except switch the first five items with second five items.

  1. Click your “Favs” playlist on left pane under your iPod symbol
  2. Sort by album by clicking album column in main (right) pane
  3. Save current order by ctrl-clicking “Favs” playlist, selecting “Copy To Play Order”
  4. Sort by playlist order by clicking on column to the left of the ‘Name’ column (has no name, contains just numbers). Make sure arrow is pointing up.
  5. Select first five items, then drag down right below the next five.
  6. Save by repeating step 3.

Note: this was on a Mac using iTunes 7.02, iPod version 1.2.1

For me, this is huge – most of my music is live sets and the mp3 tag info is poor. Plus i love my playlists, several are 50 songs are more, and now i can easily pull out one song i’m sick of, add another song or two, or switch the order around to my full pleasure. Hurray.

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