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Erasing a single song from an iPod is easy enough. Simply connect the iPod to iTunes, ust the iPod Preferences window which pops up, and drag the offending song off the list.

But what if you need to erase more than one song? In those cases dragging and dropping just won't do, it's too tedious.

There are any number of situations where you just want your iPod to sync your favorite songs, and erase all the rest. Maybe you share your iTunes library is shared and other family members' songs sneak their way onto your iPod or perhaps there's that annoying ABBA track that keeps leaping from your shuffle, through your earbuds, and straight into your head. Worse still, your music collection has outgrown your iPod and you need to erase some to make them all fit.

I have a combination of all these problems. My iTunes library - podcasts, music, movies, TV shows and audiobooks - takes up 63 Gigabytes. My 16Gb iPod Touch holds a quarter of that. Then there are my sister's Spice Girl songs, stealthily scattered around my library, ready to blast the masculinity out of me at any moment (and I need all the masculinity I can get).

I've set up iTunes to erase all these hassles automatically. I've got no song lists to weed through and I don't need to update every time I get a new song. I just use those magical tabs, boxes and checklists that you'll find in iPod window once you plug it into iTunes. There all listed along the top of the window, but first I'll take you through them, one by one.

First, I go to the 'Podcasts' tab. From here I can select to copy only the ones I want. But they still take up too much space, so I use the tab at the top of the list and elect to have only the five most recent shows loaded onto my iPod. Right there I've cut out about 18 Gigs (if only weight loss were that simple).

I do the same thing when I click on the 'TV Shows' tab. Here I use a slight variation and choose 'all unwatched episodes of...' in the tab at the top. Then I turn my sights to the 'Movies' tab. Unfortunately for them it's a case of everything must go!' (except for that Mika concert I want to watch on the train).

So now I'm down to a more manageable 32 Gigs.

Now I have to squish those 4007 music tracks into to just under 14Gb. It doesn't look like an easy task, end to end those songs would play for 26 days.

To do this I'm using smart playlists, hands down one of the best features in iTunes.

From the file menu in iTunes I chose New Smart Playlist'. Now I'm confronted with yet more tabs and checklists which let me set the rules of which songs are allowed in my playlist. First I'm going to say goodbye to my audiobooks. To do this I'll choose 'genre' in the first tab, 'is not' in the second, and 'audiobook' in the third. That's my first rule, 'genre - is not - audiobook'. To add a second rule, just click on the plus sign. In a similar vein I'm making this one 'artist - is not - The Spice Girls'

Now to limit the size of my playlist. Check the 'limit' box at the bottom of the window and then use the tab to select the limit. I'm going to limit my list to 13Gb, but I want this to be 13 Gigs of my best music. To do that just click the 'selected by' tab, I'm changing mine to 'highest rated'. You can also choose 'select by most often played' or 'select by random'.

To add this new playlist to your iPod just go into the 'Music' tab and select your newly made playlist.

I've got everything I'll ever want or need on my 16Gb iPod Touch.... Now where did I leave my headphones?

Learn more about this author, Ben Winsor.
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