We are getting ready to go on a short road trip. This means that I wanted to add some music to my wife’s iPod (it’s what we use for music on the trip). While selecting songs to add to the iPod (checking the little boxes in iTunes), I accidentally selected all of the songs in the iTunes library.

Given that we have over 5,000 songs in our library, this can be a bit of a problem. No one wanted to go back through the the library and select the songs that we actually wanted to synch to the iPod. Fortunately, we had recently synchronized the iPod and it had our currently selected songs on it. After some Googling, my wife found a solution that allowed us to reselect our desired songs without spending hours going through the library again.

Her solution is as follows.

1. On the iPod, create an On the Go Playlist.
2. Go to Genres.
3. Hold the select button down for each genre until it flashes blue three times. This should add the songs in that genre to the playlist.
4. Go back to playlists and open the On the Go Playlist.
5. Scroll to bottom.
6. The last option is save. Select that.
7. Uncheck all music in iTunes.
8. Synch iPod
9. The synch will wipe all the music off the iPod. However, the playlist will show up in iTunes.
10. Open the new playlist in iTunes. Select all of the songs. Right click, and choose check selected.
11. Check any other other playlists you might have to make sure that all songs were selected.
12. Synch again.
13. Problem solved.