JohnSwenson;562611 Wrote: > Nobody can give you a setup thats guaranteed to work no matter what. The > best you can do is try and steer clear of what seems to cause the most > problems. > > Number 1 is to use a self powered drive (has its own power supply). > > Number 2 is to make sure you don't have any large cover art. Either as > separate files or embedded in files. Up to 600x600 seems to work well, > beyond that can cause problems. > > The best arrangement seems to be a separate directory for each album > with a separate cover.jpg in that directory and no embedded artwork in > each file. > > If your tagging in the flacs themselves is good you don't have to use > any more complex a directory structure than a directory per album. If > you WANT to you can have a more complex structure with genres etc. It > won't hurt. Its perfectly fine having the album directories under > another directory. Say you have a directory called music, then the > albums under that, or more levels if you wish. > > Make sure you empty the trash before putting the disk on the Touch, it > doesn't know about windows trash can and just sees anything in there as > regular files, this can confuse the heck out of things. > > Don't store other non-music related pictures on the drive. If you have > a directory of jpegs for say a slide show it will see them and try and > use them as cover art and most likely crash and burn trying to resize > them. > > > The one thing you CAN'T do is have the flacs under a directory called > say music at the top level and another directory at the top level with > other non music files. The scanner will look at ALL files on the disk, > you cannot tell it just look at the files under music. So its best if > you just have music files on the disk. For example if you have a music > directory and a games directory, all the little files with bleeps and > blurps and gunshots etc will show up in your music library and all the > image files will be converted into into cover art, probably not what > you want! > > And after you get all that done, let the Touch finish its initial scan > before attempting to do anything else, this could take many hours, let > it finish. If it doesn't finish, the next time its going to try again, > but this time you might try and play music since you now have a partial > database, this is guaranteed to be disastrous. Trying to play music > while the scan is happening is guaranteed to be an exercise in > frustration, don't do it. > > Remember that each time you boot the Touch it will do a quick scan of > the disk to check for new music, make sure this quick scan has > completed before playing music, if you don't you will be playing music > while a scan is happening, see above! > > That should do it. If you follow this you should have a fairly good > probability of things just working. > > John S.
Wow, this is great advice! I ordered 2 touch's to replace SB2/3, but want to run it all Mac-based. I was wavering between a powered and portable drive, but this makes it clear! I see the Touch runs ALAC natively, so I'm hoping to use an external drive with Apple Lossless, not FLAC, files. Sometimes I'll run the SB through my Macbook, but would also like the option of the direct external drive to Touch setup. Any tricks to this specific to Macs/ALAC/iTunes? Thanks, Bruce -- becseattle ------------------------------------------------------------------------ becseattle's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=39735 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80516 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
