iPod playlist question

[Spanky McDuck]

I have about a dozen pod casts I listen to at work, other than KATG they are mostly science, astronomy, etc. The play list I have is basically all unheard pod casts in the order received. This works fine, but I want more. :-)

Anyone know of a way to intermix random music between pod casts? Is there a program that might could make a play list from combining two play lists?

I work part time in a factory on a simple production line. Very mind numbing but it's hard to take the time to change play lists or such while working (in other words, the bosses don't want to see us standing there 'playing with our toys' when we should be working :-))

TIA

[FreydNot]

You might be able to make a second smart playlist that was fed by two other playlists - one with your podcasts and one with a selection of music. It would be pretty easy to make the smart playlist select from both lists randomly, but I'm not sure how you would keep the podcasts in the order you want them in.

[Spanky McDuck]

That might work. After thinking about it, some of the pod casts will work fine if they play out of order. Others, like KATG, work better if in order but I tend to listen to them first anyway.

[Spanky McDuck]

That did seem to work. Making a smart playlist that pulls from two other playlists works but still need to tweak it to pull a few more podcasts each time.

Example: 5 hours of randomly selected music and podcasts only pulls one or two podcasts, some of which are only a few minutes long.

Thanks for the idea.

[FreydNot]

Glad it worked. If you want to tweak it for more music, add a third music source and point it to the same music playlist. That way it will be 33% podcasts and 66% music. You might end up with some duplicated music, so I would add a 'last played is more than 1 day ago' to the music smart play list.

[Spanky McDuck]

Okay - here are the results. In iTunes this works perfectly. I setup a smart play list pulling from two other play lists (unheard podcasts and favorite music) and set it up to randomly fill up 6 hours. The resulting playlist is just what I wanted.

However... When I sync it to my iPod, the play list changes. After compairing the two I find tha all of the music from the play list in Itunes is there(listed in the same order) but not the podcasts. Then it looks like the iPod fills in the remaining time with randomly selected music and podcasts.

I guess this will still work, but why will it not transfer the playlists correctly?

[FreydNot]

Make sure all three playlists are on the iPod. Since smart playlists are created on the fly, if the songs or podcasts aren't on the ipod's hard drive it won't include them in the playlist.

[Spanky McDuck]

Everything is there. Turns out I didn't like mixing it up after all. Listening to Avenege Sevenfold's Nightmare, then hearing a podcast about the lastest advances in astronomy was...odd. I'm usually in the mood for one or the other but not both, so live and learn I guess. But thanks for the help.