What exactly does Live Updating in a Playlist do?

[Mark Zimmer]

I understand that it keeps track of the played count, but what other effects does Live Update have for a playlist--both in iTunes itself, and on my iPod? As I mentioned in another thread, I'm considering shutting off Live Update for some of my playlists where I don't care about the played count in order to cut down on the processor load for my huge playlists, but it's not clear to me what other consequences turning that off may have that I haven't anticipated.

[kirkmc]

Live updating updates the playlist as metadata for tracks changes. In most cases, this is play count or last played date, but it can also be rating (if you have a playlist set to find 5-star tracks, every time you rate a new track 5 stars it gets added), artist (when you add new music by an artist it gets added), genre, and so on. So you could have, for example, a playlist where Genre is Jazz, and every new jazz album you add to your library gets added to it.

 

On your iPod, the only things that will affect its contents are play count, last played date, and rating, since you can't change metadata. But if you purchase music from the iTunes Store, then any other metadata will also work.

[Mark Zimmer]

OK thanks. I forgot about the adding content to the list part---so that won't work.