TELL US HOW YOU USE AUTO/SMART PLAYLISTS...so we do it the way you want in future releases!

I've owned a Zune since day one, and now I have a Zune 80.  I love my Zunes, but I really need some of the orginal features back please.  Auto playlists and five star ratings are the big misses for me.  I'd be happy to live with a beta version to get back the features we lost in the update.

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Zune 30gb? - Waste! iPod Classic, 160gb - Dusty. iPhone wife has it. iPhone 3g, posting from it. :) Suck it Zune!

I'm coming off of years of iPod usage and missing smart/auto playlists was the biggest shock to me.  I use these almost exclusively when I play my music.

I was using a 30GB iPod video before and since I have a 50GB music collection, I couldn't put it all on my device. This means that I not only used smartplaylists for playback, but also to pick and choose what to put on the device.

Since I now have an 80GB Zune, I can sync my entire library, but there will be a time in the not-so-distant future that my collection will grow in size and exceed the capacity of my Zune so I expect this problem to return.  Also, for your 4 and 8GB users, this has got to be an issue.

Here are my scenarios:

1. Latest music

I regularly add new music so I want a playlist that has the latest music easily available.  "Latest" could either mean by date (e.g. within the last 30 days) or by size (e.g. newest 4GB of music).

2. Highest rated music

Equivalent to iTunes' "My Top Rated" auto playlist. This is driven by 4 or 5 stars. Since Zune 2 doesn't have the notion of star ratings (which I find weird) I guess the only way to do this is just find the ones that "I love".

3. Highest rated music by genre

Same as #2, except that I add another filter by genre. E.g. Rating="Love it" AND genre=Rock.

4. Highest rated music by several genres

Often times genres are smiliar but you still want to keep them separately categorized.  For example, "Rock" and "Alternative Rock" might be similar enough to include in a smartplyalist, but different enough to want to categorize differently.  I'd want a playlist like #3, except make the query similar to:

Rating = "Love it"
AND
(Genre=Rock OR Genre=Alternative Rock OR Genre=Alternative)

iTunes doesn't have this capability and I never understood why.

4. Fill the remaining free space on the device with music

After i put several playlists worth of music on the device, there will no doubt be left over space. It's great to have a playlist that is a specified size tha tyou can use to fill the rest of the device, but shoudl be composed of music NOT in the other playlists.  This gets you to listen to other music that you don't normally listen to.

I think most people used it in the same way.  Not having auto playlists with a subscription service makes it unmanageble.

I know you guys are busy, but in the mean time could you help the community fill the holes?

Could you please release some unofficial documentation about the Zune DLLs  ZuneDBLib etc.?  I've tried using it and we're missing some information about the PropertyBAG used in the query.  It should be pretty easy to pick it up from there.  This doesn't need to be an official API - just a "use at your own risk".

Second, could you fix the ratings synchronization?  When you rate a Zune song on the device it doesn't even get syncronized back to the player. 

Also, get the Zune Software team blogging.  I understand that you might want to use Apple as the role model here, but a bit of transparency would go a long way.

5 was my favs, 4 were excellent songs, 3 were good songs/songs that others would like to hear 2 was for comedy acts and novelty tracks and 1s were to be deleted for the most part.  Like neutral hate it is so bland... Who keeps songs the hate anyway? 

So on another note, does the autoplaylist function work again?

I might think about upgrading if that's the case.

This thread needs to be stickied in order to prevent 20 neu threads a day about the same thing.

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 NoSuchThingAs2 wrote:

my number one request, which the ipod never did, is a recently added list on the device that displays ***albums*** not songs!

can you ctrl+z the move to the heart/no heart system?

The old PMC framework did that.  The first sync or two (never exactly figured out how things left the New list), new media showed up in the "New" header.

The biggest thing I did with auto playlists (in WMP11 before moving to Zune) was use it to control what TV synched with my old PMC.  That, combined with an automatic sync relationship made it so that WMP automatically converted just the TV shows I wanted to a compatible format, so it was ready to sync when I plugged in.

The biggest thing I did with music auto playlists was my playlist named "Songs": "All Music, except those in these specific genres."

I always use the recently added playlist.  I enjoy being able to listen to songs I have recently put in my library.  I also like to be able to change the amount of time the playlist considers "recent."  I usually stick with the playlist containing the songs I have added in the last 30 days. 

Right before the Zune 2.0 update, I had begun using rated playlists.  I would rate my songs using the 1-5 star rating system and then create playlists from the ones I rated 5 stars, 4 stars, and so on.  This allowed me to listen to songs by rating.

If smart playlists are added to the next update of the Zune software I will be very happy.  Smart playlists and the star rating system are the main things I miss in this software.  Other than that I think it is great.

I was a super Power user of this feature. I used it every which way possible. I had over 50 auto-playlists.

Being a programmer ... I know you have been working on the engine for this functionality and won't release it till you are happy you have something that works, is extensible in future and has parity with WMP, iTunes and other media players. I have enough confidence to know you can do it.

Here are some features that would be great:

- Parity with WMP [tough] ... gotta do it
- Parity with iTunes [tough] ... gotta do it
- Allow regular expressions in comparison e.g. "Title" contains "^Love.*Hate" to find songs with Titles that start with "Love" and have "Hate" in the title ...
- Allow logical operators - AND, OR, NOT, XOR
- Allow numerical ranges - BETWEEN  e.g. "Playcount" is BETWEEN 1 and 5
- Allow criteria that refer to other playlists e.g. in "Moody" playlist and not in "Sad" playlist ... watch out for circular references
- Allow saving as XML  - invent a industry standard format that everyone can adopt and incorporates all playlist format
- Allow export to XLS files

You don't have to do this in one shot ... progressively enhance functionality towards this goal!

I would love to help/beta-test!

I just switched from an iPod to a Zune, and I sorely, sorely miss smart/auto playlists and a five-star rating system. Like It/Don't Like It just doesn't cut it. Recently Added, Recently Played, Most Played, and Top Favorites would really help as far as playlists go, along with the ability to add my own auto-playlists. I don't know what the old software was like, but it's kind of surprising to hear that these sorts of features used to be included and then were taken away!