Wow! I've finally done it! A 1-week-old 30GB iPod synched up using MC9! Thanks for all the hard work on the plug-in. The constant updates and feature upgrades encouraged me to send lots of money to Apple.
I wanted to ask several questions about what I've been doing and make a couple of suggestions (in no particular order of importance). If you'd rather this post be split out into another thread, please feel free...
1) My entire library of 8000+ tracks are stored in MC as APL files. (Rip a CD as a WAV/CUE combo, then compress the WAV with APE and split it up with the CUE sheet.) Since the iPod doesn't recognize lossless compression (yet), that meant a transcode or a convert operation. For the past 4-5 days, I've been using the "Convert Format" function to change all my APLs to MP3. It worked great overall, however there were a handful of tracks that caused the conversion process to hang. The track would decode to a WAV, but it would never encode as an MP3. The conversion process would just hang. I would have to force quit MC and manually skip those albums. Any input here?
2) The directions for the iPod/MC setup and synching that are pointed to in the help file are a great help! So much so, that you may want to consider actually including them with the MC distribution.
3) With the newer version(s) of MC & the handheld plugin, does the iPod still need to be named "IPOD"? Why the need for that in the first place?
4) My first attempt at synching the iPod failed miserably. I created a smartlist with the rule, "Media Type: audio" and tried to synch that to the iPod. Naturally, there was more music in that smartlist that the iPod could hold. MC chugged away for over an hour, happily downloading. Finally an error dialog appeared saying there were problems synching various files. I unmounted the iPod and looked at the statistics. It said I had 0 songs & 0 free capacity. I don't know if this was an overflow problem or something else...
My 2nd attempt at synching went better. I created a smartlist with the following rules, "Media Type: audio, Limit: 25000MB, Modifier: FullAlbums" so that I would leave some wiggle room on the iPod. I reformatted the iPod & tried again. About an hour later I got an error dialog saying several tracks couldn't be transferred, but this time the songs showed up when browsing the iPod in the MC tree and (better yet) showed up in the iPod itself! The error dialog was unsettling. My only guess is that there are filename problems of some kind. What are the circumstances under which this dialog appears?
5) The error dialog about file synch problems showed the full path of the songs that had problems, but spilled very wide on my screen. If I knew how to do screen shots, I'd show you what I meant. It might be better if this dialog was more like the "Import Media..." status dialog in MC. It could show how many songs were queued for transfer, how many were successful, the average transfer speed, and a details button to list the songs and/or problems.
6) The modifier "FullAlbums" in the smart list doesn't appear to work as I expected it to. I expected it to include every track on an album that otherwise satisfies the rules, but it doesn't. As an example, I know my library contains all the tracks from "Abbey Road", but the smartlist only includes tracks 1-6, 8-9, 11-13, 15, & 17. If the album were actually incomplete, it shouldn't be there, but since it is, I would have thought all the tracks would be included.
7) What kinds of transfer speeds are normal? I averaged around 7.1-7.2 MB/sec. What made me happy is that the Adaptec 4300 FireWire card I bought worked great to transfer and to power the iPod.
8) Does the iPod need to be enabled as an external FireWire drive to work with MC?
9) What's with the blank playlist? On the iPod, I can see all the Artist, Genre, and Album info from the iPod DB. There's also the single smartlist I used to synch in the "Playlist" area. However, there's a blank line listed as the first playlist.... I know other folks have seen this, but I never saw why it existed.
10) If MC9 is already running, and the iPod is connected to the machine, it doesn't appear in the Handhelds part of the tree. I have to relaunch MC. Is it possible to auto-recognize that the iPod has been attached?
UPDATE: In fact, I just tried this: MC9 running, plugged in iPod (it wasn't recognized), quit MC, launched MC (iPod drive listed in the Handhelds part of the tree), single-clicked on the iPod drive letter and got the "Media Jukebox.e.exe has generated errors and will be closed...." error. Subsequent attempts to launch MC and work with the iPod always crash the program!!
I'm sure there will be a few more questions, but the crashing problem has prevented me from asking them!
Breathlessly waiting...
Best,
Brad
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Portable Drives Plugin 9.0.18
Media Center Registered 9.0.172 -- C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center\
Microsoft Windows 2000 Workstation 5.0 Service Pack 3 (Build 2195)
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