>Philip, Slimserver does not manage music files - it has no such >capabilities, so it can never be a primary manager or "master music >library source." It employs a scanner to read an existing managed music >library. It also trashes stats regularly (clean and rescan, etc) so it's >not an ideal place to hold playback stats. > I use TrackStat to persist stats information - it is not affected by clean and rescan. I consider SlimServer to be my master music library source, as this is the source for most of my music playback. All of my music is playable through SlimServer, whereas iTunes cannot cope with FLAC. SlimServer also has a proper database that I can directly connect to to extract information in any way that I want.
>Advanced: >UNCHECK "Keep iTunes music folder organized" >UNCHECK "Copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library" >(this is the critical one) > This is what I have set my options to. >To add music to iTunes simply drag and drop it from your folders into >the iTunes library and/or individual playlists. You can do your whole >collection at once if you so choose. The last time I rebuilt my iTunes >DB (due to Slimserver bugs scanning it), I just dropped my entire >collection at once (20k files). > That is what I do, but iTunes is not clever. It seems to rescan all files looking at tags (can take some time), writing them into the xml file. So it finds new files and updates any tags. However, it doesn't remove old files that have been deleted or renamed. I get exclamation mark icons next to tracks that it can't find anymore, but sometimes only when I try to play those songs. There is no way to prune these from the iTunes library, as far as I am aware. I thought about writing my own utility that updates the xml file... iTunes is nasty with its handling of some tags (compilation albums, album artist, band, sorting all seem to fight against each other in my experience), and often it doesn't seem to group tracks onto albums correctly for me. I also have limited luck with artwork. For that reason (and also mainly because it doesn't support FLAC), I only use it as a tool for syncing music to my iPod. I never use it to play music on the PC - I always use SlimServer or FooBar for that. I am only interested in getting stats synced between iPod and SlimServer, so I can attempt to have some smart playlists to put targetted music onto the iPod Nano. Smart Playlists are irritating too, compared to dynamic playlists in SlimServer. They could be so great, but fall short of my needs on most occasions. eg. I typically like to play albums, not random songs, so I want to set up sync rules like "10 new albums", "top 10 rated albums", "up to 2Gb of albums not played in a long time". Smart Playlists allow me to limit to "100 items selected by album", but this is not random albums (I would always get the same albums alphabetically), and 100 items I think means 100 songs, ordered by album. So, I end up having loads of random songs, which means I have many artists/albums with only 1 or 2 songs on the iPod, making music playback harder. I switched iTunes to manual mode so I could just drag albums directly to it, but then discovered that it doesn't then sync ratings! >You can set Slimserver up to read from your iTunes library or just scan >the music folders directly. Letting it use iTunes has the advantages you >likely know about, such as picking up iTunes playlists and the like. > I don't use playlists. Don't really see the point in them. Thanks for the suggestions though! Phil _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/plugins
