I recently made some changes to my iPod smartlists, so that they would work with the changes to evaluation order. They now take a *lot* longer to recalculate, by about 4x to 5x.
Basically I have a base list called "iPod Base", which contains a rule to exclude anything listened to in the past 4 weeks, and limits the filetype to MP3.
Then I have a bunch of master genre lists, which specify multiple genres OR a manually constructed list with exceptions.
The lists that go on the iPod used to follow the format:
Playlist: <genre master>, Limit: 700MB, Sort: Random, Playlist: iPod Base
[These lists don't work in recent builds, since the limit cuts off the list BEFORE randomizing, so I was always getting stuff from the beginning of the list. Also the iPod Base filter would take away songs from the limit.]
I rearranged them to:
Playlist: iPod Base, Playlist: <genre master>, Sort: Random, Limit: 700MB
The new lists work very well, they certainly seem more "random", but they take a lot longer to recalculate. It is especially noticeable when I sync the iPod, because multiple lists are recalculated at once.
Anything that might help? I was thinking of putting the rules from the iPod Base list directly into the smarlists. This has helped before.