How to limit songs being synch'ed to iPod

Question

Hi,
I must be the dumbest guy around. This really should not be that hard.
My total Music Library is 28GB. In the house we have one iTunes Library. My wife, my two girls, and I all share this library. I like Rock, Country, and some of the new stuff that my girls like. My wife, she is into Streisand and also some of the new stuff. My girls are typical teenagers. One likes Country, top 40 and Rap. The other is into Rock.
I created 4 different Smart Playlists. One for each of us. They are sorted by "Last Played". The Smart Playlist use lots of rules to fine tune the selection of music. Each of these smart playlists is over 8GB.
My girls have 8GB iPod Touch's. My wife and I have 2 iPods each. Two 4GB iPods and two 8GB iPods (Older Mini's and Nanos).For simplicity, let's just talk about me and my 8GB iPod. I want to synch to my iPod only that music that is in the my Smart Playlist. And I want it to update each time I connect the iPod. And I want it to sych music that has not been played recently.
When I connect my iPod, I get a message that there is not enough room on the iPod. That is not surprising, as the playlist is bigger than the capacity of my iPod. So, I created a size limited Smart playlist based on my original Smart playlist, but now when I synch, I get an error that the size limited playlist is dependent on a playlist that can not be found.
A nice to have.... What would be cool is if I could set up the iPod touches to synch, Apps first, then photos, and then fill whatever remaining space was left from a specific Smart playlist.
So, any instructions or guides on how to set up our playlists and iPods?

Answer 1

How you delete content from your iPod depends on how it is set up to receive content from your iTunes library whether that be via automatic syncing or manual management.
For automatic syncing, you must reconfigure your settings so that the album/tracks/content you wish to remove is no longer configured to sync to your iPod.  For example, if the Sync only checked songs and videos option is enabled from under the iPod's Summary tab, make sure all the tracks for this album do NOT have a tick mark next to them in your iPod.  Then resync your iPod with iTunes.
If that isn't the case, you'll want to look at the iPod's Music configuration tab.  You can access this tab by selecting your iPod under Devices. This should bring you to the Summary tab over to the right.  Look for the Music tab along the top and select it.  Here you can configure how and what music syncs to your device.  If you make any changes to this tab, be sure to hit the Apply button in the lower right hand corner to sync the updated changes to your device.
Otherwise, if you manually manage your iPod's contents, you must manually remove content from it.  You can do this by plugging your iPod in and clicking the small black triangle next to your iPod from under the Devices section in the left hand pane of iTunes.  This will open up a submenu of content that is indented underneath the name of your device, so go ahead and click on Music (or whatever content you are wanting to remove).  Locate the track or tracks/content you wish to delete. Highlight them and hit the Delete key or choose Edit -> Delete.
B-rock