One problem with syncing playlists to an iOS device with iTunes is that you never know how much space any playlist takes up. So you may be on the sync screen in iTunes, wanting to either clear out some space on your iOS device or add more music, and you have to trust the now-unreliable capacity bar to know if the music will fit. Often, with iTunes 12, the capacity bar looks fine, but when you click the Sync button, you find that there’s not enough space on your device. I wrote about how useful it would be to know how large playlists are.
Doug Adams has created a nifty applet called Playlists Info. When you launch the app, it displays all the playlists on your device (when it’s connected to your computer and displayed in iTunes), or in your iTunes Music library, so you can know how much space each one takes up. You can then choose to sync or un-sync a playlist. You can sort by any column: playlist name, size, time or number of tracks. You can use this to choose what you can add or what to delete from your device before syncing.
Note that songs can be in multiple playlists; it’s possible that the numbers you see after adding or removing playlists don’t equal the size of those playlists. But with that in mind, this applet will help you if you’re trying to decide what to sync.