iTunes has some really advanced features for organising your music but seems to ignore the fact that a lot of people may have music libraries larger than their iPod. Its solutions of only adding manually chosen playlists or randomly selecting music itself to go onto the iPod aren’t very helpful for people who still want the majority of their library accessible on the go or want more control over the music on their iPod.

My solution is to create a master live updating ‘smart playlist’ for the iPod which ignores songs that have been tagged with iTunes Only in the Grouping field, unless they have a rating of higher than one star. The reason for the second condition is that it allows me to tag entire albums as iTunes Only but still have single songs off them show up on the iPod if I rate them.

The advantage of doing it this way is that new content you put into iTunes will still automatically get added to the iPod unless you tell it not to.

Create an iPod Master Playlist

1. In iTunes go to File –> New Smart Playlist…
2. Add the rule ‘Grouping does not contain iTunes Only’
3. Optionally add another rule ‘Rating is greater than one star’ and change the Match rule at the top to ‘any’
4. Make sure Live updating is checked, and the Limit and Match only… options are unchecked
5. Click OK and name your playlist ‘iPod’

Tag Selected Songs with ‘iTunes Only’

1. In your iTunes library, select the song(s) you don’t want on your iPod.
2. Right-click and select Get Info
3. On the Info tab, go down to the Grouping field and enter ‘iTunes Only’

Instruct your iPod to Sync with the iPod Playlist

1. Connect your iPod to your PC
2. Select your iPod under Devices on the left
3. From the iPod Summary screen, select the Music tab
4. Make sure Sync Music is checked then click the Selected Playlists radio button
5. Select your iPod playlist in the list and any others you decide you want on your iPod, click Apply in the bottom right then click Sync

Now you can easily select what songs you do or don’t want on your iPod.

I’ve always had troubles with the Microsoft Wireless Desktop 6000 and before it the Microsoft Wireless Desktop Elite not scrolling correctly in iTunes and more recently Picasa. The scrolling was very slow in these applications and a lot of the time seemed to not work at all. It would take frantic scrolling of the wheel to make the listings move just a couple of lines. Completely useless.

My sister is visiting for a couple of weeks and I was complaining about the issue to her when she suggested I try her notebook mouse — It worked perfectly.

The fix is actually pretty simple — change the type of mouse in the IntelliPoint Mouse Properties window to something different. I now have my Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 setup as a Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. I simply chose this mouse because it has the same number of buttons as mine. Once it’s changed iTunes and Picasa scrolled correctly. Everything else still scrolls fine too (web pages, etc.) however I did find I needed to turn the sensitivity down a fair bit otherwise it was quite jumpy.

I had looked into this a couple of weeks ago and found a forum post that mentioned the same fix and there were a couple of other sites that linked to this Microsoft Help & Support article (or a similar one with the same basic fix) as well but when I tried changing mine to an earlier IntelliMouse Explorer and a couple of others it made no difference. So if it doesn’t work the first time keep selecting different types of mice until you find one that keeps all your buttons and works!

UPDATE

In the excitement of finally having iTunes and Picasa scrolling properly I neglected to test the solution fully. After a couple of reboots the mouse went back to its same old frustrating not-scrolling-properly ways in those programs. Even after a full reinstall of Windows (due to an unrelated matter) I still could not get the mouse to scroll properly no matter what I tried. On top of that, the keyboard has started not picking up all the letters I typed. Especially the CTRL and Question Mark keys.

The final solution? Buy Logitech.

My absolute final solution for these issues was to buy a Logitech wired keyboard and Logitech wireless mouse. I bought the Logitech G15 Keyboard and MX 1100 mouse. The mouse scrolls perfectly in every program I use it in and the keyboard does not miss letters typed or need a bulky wireless receiver sitting right next to it to make it work (completely negating the entire purpose of having it wireless I might add).

For some seemingly unknown reason tonight my copy of iTunes decided to start displaying the following “Saving iTunes Library” dialog whenever I quit the application.

The dialog would only be there for a few seconds but would make my PC completely unresponsive while it did its thing.

I remembered I had experienced this issue before but couldn’t find the site I’d originally found the solution on. A lot of searching later I found this thread on iLounge containing the solution — Exclude your iTunes folder from your Antivirus program’s active scanning.

I realised after this that I had just done a fresh reinstall of my antivirus program, NOD32, to fix another issue and in doing this had cleared out all my previous settings. Adding my iTunes folder to its exclusions list again worked a treat.