Just bought Gold, now how do I easily manage music for different devices?

[Mikey1969]

Hi all,
So I finally was able to buy MM Gold. I bought the Lifetime license so I will not have to worry about upgrades.

Anyway, now that I have Gold, I feel I can best manage my collection. I have it set right now to add files to my phone and my daughter's iPod, but it seems to be a pain in the butt, and I have issues with sometimes music adding to one device that I didn't want to add to that one. SO it sounds like the 'Collections' feature in MM Gold may fix this. Am I right? In the long run, I would just like to add music that I want on my daughter's iPod, music for my phone, music for our other iPod, and music for my wife's phone. We all share a lot(but not all) of our musical tastes, so I would like an easy way to add it, label it, and transfer it easily. Is "Collections" the way to do this? And can I have music in multiple collections? Some music would be in 'Daughter', 'Me', and 'Wife', for example, some would just be in the collection 'Wife', and some would just be in the Collection 'Wife' and 'Daughter'.

Anyway, my plan would be that the 'Me' collection would automatically sync with my phone, but only copy music in that particular collection.

Am I doing this right?

[Lowlander]

AutoPlaylists or Collections is a good method as they're Criteria based. Depending on how you define who likes a file you may want to use Custom fields to indicate who likes a particular file. Then using AutoPlaylists or Collections you can have the files show their automatically. Files can belong to any number of AutoPlaylists/Collections or none at all (except Entire Library which always contains all files).

In the Device Profile you can select which AutoPlaylist(s)/Collection(s) should be synced. It's all dynamic so if a file suddenly becomes part of a selected AutoPlaylist/Collection it would automatically sync the next time. If no longer part of it, it would be offered to be deleted (default settings).

[Mikey1969]

OK, that's a start. So what do I do to create a Collection? I created one for my daughter as a test, and said that the field 'Custom 1' should contain 'Shelby'(Her name). I was then able to select some test files, edit the Properties and put "Shelby" in the field 'Custom 1'/They showed up in the collection, so that seems to work. But if I want to also put those songs in MY list, can I just add my name separated by commas? I tested that and it works. Is that the best way, then?

I understand that there are multiple ways to do all of this, so "best way" might not be the way to phrase that. I guess what I mean to ask is if there are any potential issues doing it this way? Otherwise, I will separate the names by comma and go about my merry way.

I really appreciate all of the help, because I think you've chimed in on almost every one of my posts. This is a great community...

[Lowlander]

Custom fields are not multi-value fields (which would be best), but your proposal should work with contains. If you at any point you want to change it the RegExp Find & Fix Addon may be a great help: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=28510&hilit=RegExp+Find+%26+Fix

Other method could be along Genre, Rating or Location, but all present some challenges when having shared interests.

[Mikey1969]

"Contains" seems to work great. I just tagged my music collection. Now as I add stuff, I can tag it individually, which will be much easier. THanks again for the help, and I hope that this thread will help someone else with questions.