[markw10]

I've used my 30GB iPod for quite awhile and don't have memory issues. My entire iTunes collection is around 18GB so I simply sync it. With the iPhone I just want to put my favorite music and no video at this time.

How is the best way to do this? I tried to simply drag songs over but it didnt work. I don't seem able to choose by genre, artist, etc. Is the only way to do this to create a playlist in iTunes such as 'iPhone music' and then choose to sync that playlist? If I do that will it then play okay if I search my genre, artist, etc, on my iPhone?

[analogika]

of course it will.

Note also that you can combine playlists, where you have say a couple of smart playlists (e.g. Funk not heard within the last 3 months) and a few "fixed" (manual) lists, and you create another "iPhone" smart playlist that draws 7GB from all of them at random.

[PhatBoyG]

I use a Smart Playlist that only sync non-Lossless tracks to the phone. That way, whenever I have something I want to put on the phone, I convert it to AAC and it copies it to the phone.

Mind you, have a 180 GB Apple Lossless library on the network. All the tracks in my iTunes library are pointing to the network drive. So when I convert a track to AAC, it makes a copy on my local iTunes folder in the smaller format. This makes it pretty easy to select what you want (and makes it easy to clean up, just delete the folder and run RemoveMissingTracks script).

I use another one for movies, when size < 750MB and video kind is Movie, and use FFMPEG to convert from 2500 kbps Apple TV movies to 500 kbps iPhone/iPod size movies.

[kmkkid]

Just make a smart playlist (option+cmd+n) and have it select your top rated, or most listened to songs and limit it to the amount of free space left on the phone, or what ever amount you want it limited to. That's how I do it for my SE phone anyways.

[DigitalEl]

My library is about 9 GB of music and 5 GB of video. For music, I simply told iPhone to sync all of my playlists. Songs not appearing in playlists (generally lower-rated stuff) don't get copied over. I then created a playlist I called "The Kitchen Sink," which has songs I want on my iPhone, but that don't appear in my other 40 playlists. It's mostly made up of album cuts to groups I like... Lesser tracks, I guess.

For video, I just had to be super-selective. A couple of Family Guy episodes, a sh!tload of Onion News Network clips, etc.

After photos & "other," I have about 1 gig free now.