How can I keep Voice Memos out of Music in iTunes?

Question

I like the fact that sync downloads voice memos to my Macbook Pro. But I do not like the fact iTunes includes my voice memos in my general music library. It's a bit goofy to be listening to my music on shuffle and all of a sudden have it start playing my voice speaking! Is there a way to prevent them from showing up there - but still have them synced?

This has been happening for as long as I've been making voice memos, and is happening in iTunes 11 also.

Answer 1

I totally agree with you about Apple not implementing a proper place for voice memos in iTunes. They've even added a separate window for home made movies in iTunes 11's Movies section. This kind of disappointing.

But anyway, perhaps you already now this but one possible solution would be to uncheck syncing of voice memos in iTunes's settings for your iOS device.

This way, they won't be downloaded to your MBP so you will have to manually transfer them.

Manual transferring of voice memos might be disappointing for you but on the other hand, a smart playlist might affect your iTunes library's performance since a smart playlist keep scanning library for changes.

Answer 2

I agree also that this is an inconvenience, and it is annoying. Some other ways you can resolve the issue is by highlighting all of you voice memos in the entire library (easy to do if you have your library sorted by genre), right click to 'get info', go to the options tabs and check the option 'skip when shuffling' and everything that is highlighted can be still checked and they will never play unless you manually select them.

Also under that same options tab, there's a drop-down under 'Media kind' and if you select 'audio book' instead of voice memo (or music), they will no longer appear in your main library, and will instead appear under the audio books library. Hope this helps.