iTunes “checked” failure
So iTunes has a lovely feature allowing you to uncheck music and it therefore doesn’t get played when shuffling (or any form of playlist, really) and to hear it you must play it manually. That’s nice for songs that have gotten really old. It’s also nice for videos you don’t want randomly playing (why does it do that with music videos!? They’re tagged properly because I BOUGHT THEM IN iTUNES!).
However, one interesting feature is the ability to ‘sync only checked songs and videos’. That’s handy for iPhones and such which will likely not contain songs you wouldn’t wanna come up when you hit “play” and ignore it, due to their small storage space. As far as the “movies” tab goes, they presume you’ll have more movies on your computer than your device, so you can individually check them off as being loaded to the iPhone or not in that tab. These checks are DIFFERENT than the checks in your Movies library. However, they do not OVERRIDE those other checks.
Let’s use The Dark Knight and Up as example films. You don’t want TDK to come up randomly in your video jukebox as it were, but you do want Up to. However, you want to watch TDK later on your iPhone. As a result, the video is unchecked in your Movies library, but checked in the list of movies that you explicitly WANT synced with your iDevice. If you check the box saying “Sync only checked songs and videos”, iTunes decides that although you explicitly want that movie, it’s not checked, and thus shouldn’t be synced.
This is ridiculous. If I had the option to “Sync all movies”, then of course I really mean “sync all checked movies” if I’ve also selected the “sync only checked…” option. Yet if I select them individually, that option should be ignored in this case.
At the very least, Apple, you could pull a really dumb workaround and split the “sync only checked…” item into a series of sub-checkboxes, or just two very similarly named checkboxes wherein the only difference is “songs” on one and “videos” on the other. I’d prefer you to realize that explicitly requested videos should sync regardless of their preference in the library.
