Steve:
Been away on vacation, and I see a lot of great work has been done. Good news. Bad news is I'm back w/more work for ya.
OK, backed up my library and took the plunge. Here's what I did, everything was as expected at this stage of the build:
Restored iPod
Loaded 3K tunes
Disconnected.
Rated one song, played it throgh
Updated MC9 w/iPod info.
It wiped all my ratings out in MC9 but the one song I played. It did update the playcount info.
So, here's where I think we have a problem in the way things are architected now.
Proposed UI/ArchitectureWhat you're doing now it seems is reading the
entire database for rating changes when that's not necessary. The Play Counts file is really your "history" file. It indicates to you all the songs that should be read for changes. Seems to me that those files and
only those files should have their playcounts and ratings adjusted. If it doesn't exist in the Play Counts file, as far as you're concerned it wasn't touched by the iPod.
Now, this might not be the case as it could be possible that a rating was changed but the song wasn't played all the way through, in which case it wouldn't be updated in MC9. But, I'm willing to bet that iTunes would function in just the same way, namely, that if a tune didn't make it into the Play Counts file, it doesn't get updated during a sync w/iTunes. Maybe a Mac user could check this out for us. Could be wrong (have been before). If I am wrong, then iTunes is using some other indicator to determine which songs have had their ratings changed. Because there's no way that iTunes is retagging an entire library on each sync. It's just way too fast.
So, that would solve the problem we have now where your entire library has to be updated during each sync which just takes too long. It should only update played and/or rate-changed songs.
Now, I said this before and I know it's a work in progress, but I hope we can revamp the UI so that we have
one sync command that does both the updating and the actual syncing.
As I said in a previous post it would be great if we sould have the sync dialog box come up when you select sync, add a checkbox there to enable updating MC9 w/iPod's data. If that's checked the following steps happen:
1. Progress bar w/"Reading iPod Data"
2. Progress bar w/"Updating Tags and Smartlists"
3. Progress bar w/Syncing Tunes (the normal sync progress bar
Ideally, this would be the same progress bar for all three w/different titles or whatnot, but it sure would look better that way and would be nice to have it all in one step.
Sorry to be such a pill. These are just my thoughts. Others will probably disagree, but I wanted to get 'em out there to think about.
Adam