I am investigating my options for sharing statistics between SlimServer and an iPod. I don't really use iTunes, except for syncing to an iPod, which is mainly used for music playback in my car.
I have finally figured out how to sync iTunes and iPod (I had initially configured by iPod to be in manual sync mode, to select what albums get syned, but this disabled ratings syncing). So, now I'm thinking it would be good to sync between SlimServer and iTunes, such that ratings are shared between SlimServer and my iPod. What are my options? I know there is some iTunes support directly provided by SlimServer, but I thought that was just simple playlist import. I am aware of facilities in TrackStat, but I've also seen other iTunes plugins are available. I think TrackStat is what I want, as I use TrackStat for creating ratings in SlimServer. However, I've read Erlands TrackStat Wiki page, and it's not clear exactly how it works. My setup: I am using SlimServer running as a service on Windows XP Pro. The music collection includes several sub-sets of music libraries (my music and my wife's music, for example). I run iTunes on the same PC, but it runs under two user accounts (mine and the wife's). We have our own iPods. My wife doesn't really bother to rate her music, so I'm not too bothered about trying to get a solution to work with multi-user accounts. But my iTunes library will be a sub-set of the SlimServer library. Half of my library is FLAC, most of the rest is mp3. Slimserver and iTunes use the same source for the mp3 files. As iTunes is dumb with regards foreign music formats, I don't generally bother to duplicate FLAC in mp3 format for iTunes, but on some occasions (i.e. favourite albums) I have duplicated some flac albums to mp3 files and loaded the copy into iTunes (the copies are put in a separate area such that Slimserver doesn't see them). Some questions therefore about using TrackStat to sync ratings: 1. When importing from the designated iTunes music library xml file to SlimServer, what happens if SlimServer/TrackStat already has statistics for the songs being imported? Probably not a big deal, as once I've set a rating in either place, I probably won't be changing it. I just want to know what will happen before I try it! I believe the iTunes stats will overwrite the Trackstat ratings (presumably only for songs that have ratings in iTunes). 2. What happens with the playcounts? Is it possible that an import from iTunes could cause the playcount within SlimServer to be reduced (songs played more frequently in SlimServer than in iTunes since the stats were exported from Slimserver). If this is the case, is it not possible to find the last played time for both ends, and use the stats from that source? Maybe it would even be possible to consider SlimServer to be the master, and remember the playcount before sync with iTunes and compare when importing, thus incrementing playcount in trackstat by the difference. 3. If I import stats from iTunes for the mp3 copies of flac files, does the import convert the stats to the appropriate flac source in SlimServer? TrackStat seems to do this translation on export, but what about importing? 4. How does the export to iTunes work? I guess I need to do a one-off complete export, followed by dynamic incremental exports (does this export happen as each track is played, or periodically?). 5. TrackStat plugin config says that it will write to a file, and then some perl scripts need to be run to apply the changes to iTunes. Is/Can this be automatic? Is there any way to do an automatic import from iTunes (eg. when iTunes is run, or my iPod is connected)? Sorry for all the questions! Phil _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/plugins
