Posted on: January 9th, 2011 by Daniel Welcome! If you’re new here, you may want to sub­scribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The more I use the fan­tas­tic Rdio ser­vice, the less I use iTunes at work on on my iPhone. Rdio has a solid 80 of the music that I own and more impor­tantly, a ton of the music that I like but don’t really want to buy (things like Clas­si­cal music, jazz, hol­i­day music, etc – things I don’t want to waste my hd space on but do want to listen to from time to time). Being the OCD person that I am though, there is some­thing extremely wrong with having songs on my iPhone that can also be accessed by the Rdio app at any time. So, I decided to take action.

The way my iPhone is set up to sync music cur­rently is as follows: 1gb of my most recently added music to iTunes. These are my new songs that gen­er­ally need rating and haven’t been worn out yet. 1gb of songs rated higher than 2 stars and not played in the past month. This is my ‘moldy oldies’ list of songs I should be lis­ten­ing to more (or delet­ing if they stink). 500mb of songs that I add to a manual playlist called iPhone, but it only pulls in the oldest played songs.

In other words, if I add 1gb of music, it adds the music least recently played. 500mb of songs rated higher than 4 stars, the most recent played. This is my ‘popular’ list. So, what I’d done is added one rule to each of these playlists.

I cre­ated a manual playlist called ‘Is in Rdio’ and went thru my library, and added any songs that already appear in my Rdio library to it. I then added the afore­men­tioned rule to make sure any song added to my iPhone playlists do not also appear in my ‘Is in Rdio’ playlist. This way, the only songs that appear on my iPhone are songs that cannot also be accessed by the Rdio iPhone app or website. If I ever decide to stop using Rdio, noth­ing changes.

I simply delete the 4 con­di­tions in those playlists and life goes on. As an aside, seri­ously give Rdio a shot. It’s a fan­tas­tic music sub­scrip­tion ser­vice that adds a small layer of ‘social’ as well, so you can see what your friends are adding and lis­ten­ing to. It’s as much music as you care to listen to via your browser for $5 a month, or for $10 you can also use their iPhone/Android/iPad app to stream music to (and you can also down­load music to the Rdio app to listen to offline if you’re a full sub­scriber. Totally worth it, and that’s how I listen to Rdio in my car, avoid­ing band­width charges while on the go).