After a lot of tinkering with my music files, I have achieved what seems to be perfect joy with my Touch, its internal TinySB server, its USB drive, and my iPod -- all for the same music files. Thanks very much to the postings by Jean on this forum, whose advice I sort of took.
When I first tried to use TinySB, I had a mixture of Apple Lossless and mp3 files. I was also using iTunes. There were two main problems while using TinySB: 1. Tracks would often not play fully, but would skip to the next track in the album or playlist. 2. Artwork would usually not display on the Touch. Furthermore, I was loathe to give up lossless quality on my Touch, yet I wanted to have just a single set of files on my computer that I could use on both my Touch and iPod. It seemed clear that I would have to move from Apple Lossless to FLAC for the sake of the Touch, but what about the iPod? I solved these issues by following Jean's advice, more or less, with other suggestions from this august board. My current setup, which has worked perfectly for a few weeks now: I use a Western Digital 500MB USB drive. I have an 80GB iPod Classic. 1. All files are ripped to FLAC or mp3. I used dbPowerAmp to batch convert all my Apple Lossless files to FLAC. On my quad-core laptop, this process took only a little over an hour for about 2,000 tracks. My resulting library is now about 2,000 FLAC tracks and 4,000 mp3 tracks. 2. So the problem now is that I want to use my iPod for music on the go, but of course iPods don't play FLAC files. I didn't want to have to maintain duplicate tracks, nor did I want to convert all the lossless files to lossy mp3 files. MediaMonkey Gold Edition to the rescue. Cost $19.95 and was money well spent. MediaMonkey can sync with iPods as well as USB hard drives, and lets you set different preferences for each device, and it remembers these preferences each time you sync. For the iPod, I set it to transcode FLAC files to mp3s at 256 kbs (you can choose any rate you want). For the USB drive, I set it to leave the FLAC files as FLAC. Now, with MediaMonkey, I can maintain one set of files, and it does the magic for me when I sync the USB drive or the iPod. Lovely! 3. Art work. There were too many variables for me to track down to figure out why art displayed on the Touch for some tracks but not for others. My solution works, although I'm not sure if it's necessary. My solution is for tracks to be stored in a folder dedicated to each album. My filing system is My Documents\My Music\Album Artist\Album\Track.flac. In each Album folder, I've stored a Folder.jpg image of the album art. I've also embedded EXACTLY THE SAME IMAGE into the file tag for every file. MediaMonkey lets you do this easily, and there is an "extension" for MediaMonkey called "Album Art Tagger" that will do this for your entire collection in one fell swoop. It can extract the folder.jpg file, or embed the folder.jpg file. As it turned out, iTunes (or some other program over the years) had inserted .png files as the artwork into my files. All these had to be replaced with .jpg files. I used the DOS shell command dir *.png /s from my My Music folder to locate these files and delete them. Then I used MediaMonkey's tag-from-web option to find quality art work where possible. For obscure albums, I used Album Art Downloader (freeware). For really obscure albums, I used Google or scanned them from CD covers myself. 4. Playlists. MediaMonkey handles playlists nicely for the iPod. When syncing, as long as you've configured MediaMonkey to sync playlists, they show up perfectly on the iPod. For the USB drive to use with TinySB, you need to configure MediaMonkey to sync them to the /Playlists/ folder on the drive. This is easy enough. Trouble is that MediaMonkey writes them as if for a Windows machine, not for the Linux machine that is TinySB. So you need to change all the \ characters to / characters and you need to change \My Music\ to /media/sda/My Music/. Do do so for each file by hand or search/replace with Notepad would be a real chore. I hankered for my old days as a Unix command line geek. I found WinGrep as a freeware download, and installed it. Now, after syncing MediaMonkey to the USB drive, I use WinGrep to do the universal search and replace of the above strings in the entire playlists directory on the USB drive, and they're good to go. WinGrep uses "regular expressions" which can look a little baffling to the uninitiated. The long and short of it is that regular expressions are just an incredibly powerful way of using wildcard symbols for text manipulation. to adjust the playlists for use on the USB, you need to do two steps in WinGrep: First, replace: \\My Music with /media/sda1/My Music Second, replace: \\ with / (In regular expressions, the \ character is a control character, so if you want to search for a true \ character, you have to double it to \\) So, in the end, I can use the same library of files on my Touch via TinySB and on my iPod, and the artwork always displays on the Touch. Playlists work great on all devices. I deleted my iTunes files and never plan to go back. One other program I've found handy: MP3tag. It will show absolutely every tag in a file, even obscure ones not shown by MediaMonkey. Turns out that is one called "compilation" that, if set to 1, TinySB will interpret such that the track will be listed under "Various Artists" in addition to listing it under the Album Artist or Artist. This was very annoying until I found the tag and removed it from all offending files. I hope that helps anybody else who might have the same issues. Richard -- trinkner ------------------------------------------------------------------------ trinkner's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=40974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=84390 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
