Now suppose you’re a busy person or simply don’t have the time to select what music you’ll want to hear every morning before going to work, so sitting in front of your iTunes program and selecting what you thing you’re in the mood to hear is out of the question. But of course, the chances you want to listen to different music from yesterday is high. And because you are a pragmatic geek, you’re trying to find a way to perfectly update your iPod music to fit your needs automatically.

Smart playlists come to the rescue!

Here’s the best solution I’ve found so far to solve this problem.

First of all, have a music selection of the albums you like the most. It has to be a small selection, so, although it may sound redundant, be selective! To do so, create a new playlist from the File menu as shown in the screenshot above. Now drag and drop your album selection there. When you’re done, select the playlist and write down its size (you can see the size of mine in the screenshot above).

New Playlist

PlaylistSize

Now let’s create a new playlist, but this time we’ll select a smart playlist. Smart playlists are playlists that get filled according to some rules you may put on them, and the options can be combined each other with and and or clauses, so the possibilities are really huge.

New Smart Playlist

Editing a Smart Playlist

Once you have the playlist created, edit it and select the options you want for it. For example, to reach the goal we mentioned at the beginning of this post, the first thing we want from this playlist is that whatever gets in it, it’s not in the fixed music playlist we created before. For the variety of songs, we could select some rule like the one that lets us select songs that have not been played in the last few days. And you should also select the maximum size of the playlist, being the size of our iPods memory minus the size of the fixed music playlist. If you want your songs to be grouped by albums you must select the option as well, as shown on the screenshots. Don’t forget to have the playlist being updated in real time so it always has the corresponding properties met. You can set another options such as genre or artirst filtering, rating and a lot more options.

Smart Playlist Configuration

And voilà, it’s done. Now you only have to plug in your iPod and, on the sync options, select those two playlists we just created. From now on you’ll only have to connect your iPod to have it always updated with your favorite music and a selection of the rest of your music library according to your own preferences, with no hurries, without having to configure anything else, just plug and go!

When I bought this gadget some weeks ago I was a bit averse. I didn’t believe that this cheap sensor (30€/$) could measure my training accurately. I was wrong.

Like in all company products, Apple have achieved again a perfect symbiosis between simplicity and power. For people who like go running this is a perfect gadget. Apart from the functions of a normal music player, it has some extra ones that make the difference. You can measure your distance or your pace, you have the information of pasts trainings stored and maybe the most important, you can inject some extra forces with the PowerSong. The PowerSong is only a song that you preset before go running and it’s the song that makes you run faster or give you extra motivation.
Apart from the functions of the kit, there is a good community of runners. On Nike website of Nike+ you can interact with the community and you can view your history. There are other interesting features like set goals and see if you can achieve them or challenge other runners to see who is the best.

To get this features up and running, you hace to tune your kit. The tune process consist on plug in the receiver in the Ipod and put the sensor in your Nike+ Shoes hole. For those who can’t pay for a new shoes, like me, there are some solutions like buy an adapter o make a homebrew hole inside your shoes reed.

For ending I have to say that the sensor doesn’t have the possibility of changing this battery but Apple people says that the sensor’s battery should outlast five pairs of running shoes. Would it be true?

Nike+