Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[jacobacci]

I am using www.xiklone.com to synchronize my lossless and lossy libraries. In order to control the behaviour of xiklone, I would like to add an ID3 tag named "Xiklone" to some of my files. This tag should have values of "include" or "exclude", so files are included or excluded from the sync process.

Is this something I can do within MC?
As I need to tag many files, I would ideally like to define a right click action that I can use on the album or artist view (the one that shows the album covers). I would like to be able to select a number of covers and then tag the files in those albums with a right click (or keyboard shortcut).

Is that possible?
Thanks a lot

[blgentry]

First, I'm not sure if you're aware, but MC has a Handheld Sync tool that's designed to copy files to a portable device.  Part of it's functionality is optional transcoding.  So you can use it to convert from FLAC to MP3, on the fly, to a target directory.  If you only want to send some files to the target directory, you can specify one or more playlists for the handheld that control what MC syncs for that handheld.  Which is what you want to do from the sound of things.  The target directory can just be the place where you want to store your lossy files.

http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Sync

To answer your question directly though:  I just tried what you asked about and it seems to work just fine.  You can create a new Library field, make it a string, and confine it's values to just "Include" or "Exclude".  Check the box to have it write to file tags, and it should write these tags into the files as you change them.

The last part of the puzzle is how to easily and quickly change the value of this new tag for files as you browse.  The answer is Pane Tagging.  Set up a Panes view and add a Pane for this field.  Then, when you click on a file, or album, etc, you can just click in the Pane on the check mark next to the value you want to set!  Click the check mark next to Include to set it to Include.

The first time you do this, there won't be any check marks next to values.  That's because you have nothing set and it doesn't know what to show.  Set something to Include.  Then set something else to Exclude.  Then both of those values will show up in the Pane so you can select them.

I just verified that this works end to end.  MC saved my new field (I called it XK) into my FLAC file.  I verified the new Tag with an external program and it's there.

I've left out a few details so I don't have to write a huge post here.  If you need more details or have questions, please ask.

Brian.

[ferday]

(as usual) blgentry beat me to it...but i want to reiterate his point...why are you using another program?

not that it matters to me of course, but i've long since ditched the 2 lossless/lossy library idea and use the handheld sync tool instead...

[jacobacci]

Thanks a lot for your inputs, guys. This is extremely helpful.

@blgentry: I tried this, brilliant.
I had another idea that should in principle work and give me a more efficient selection process. I added the "Xiklone" library field. Then in artist or album view I populated it in a file (using alt-enter for tagging). Now I can use artist or album view to select several albums / artists or files and then use alt-enter to assign a value for the "Xiklone" field to all the selected files. Do you think this is a reliable process?

@ferday: I have several reasons for using several (actually three) libraries instead of the handheld sync tool. One lossless, a 320kb/s aac and a 64kb/s aac HE. 320kb/s aac is fairly transparent to my ears. I use 64kb/s on my phone's 128Mb microSD card.
- I have > 5TB of lossless music, incl. a lot of hirez stuff on my Synology NAS, backed up on a second NAS in a different location. I stream from there to my streaming devices (Logitech squeezeboxes, Revo AXIS, Sonoro). Some of these devices only accept up to 48kHz sample rate and Synology media server is not terribly good at transcoding. It messes up the duration information and other stuff. So I keep a full samplerate copy for the Squeezeboxes and a 44,1 or 48kHz downsampled copy for the other devices. I also keep a 44.1kHz PCM converted copy of my SACD ISOs for those devices. I have never got on the fly conversion to work with all my devices all the time. There is always one that coughs.
- I have lossy copies of large parts of the library on my (several) laptops (max 1TB harddrives), my iPod, a HD in the car, the microSD card on the phone etc. Because I do not want to run several sync processes with conversions for these devices, I convert once and then just use TGMRN ViceVersa to update the files on each device
- I like to use qaac to encode to m4a and qaac is not available in MC
Maybe not the most elegant way to do this, but it has worked reliably for me in the past and it has allowed me to switch flexibly between players (foobar, JRiver, Synology Media Server) depending on the situation