I've got more than 10GB of files as well. But I didn't want to limit MC9 by only importing some files. It was pain because as I added stuff and removed stuff I'd have to keep editing my library (and my tags etc.).
Hey Adam...
I don't wanna seem nosey, but do you really need to edit your library or tags any more, now that we're using MC9? I used to loose my Playlist contents when deleting file pointers and later re-adding them. But now, I don't have any more Playlists, only Smartlists, and I don't need to worry about deleting/adding any more.
For example, the [Custom 2] field is set up to create all my "Playlists" such as "Easy", "Rock", "Euro", "Quar", "Quin", "Symp", etc. I put a keyword (e.g., Euro and/or Rock, as many as I wish) in the [Custom 2] field for each of the Playlists the entry should be part of. Each Smarlist is then:
[Playlist]=[All iPod] [Custom 2]=easy
...and each fills with its proper contents. I should point out that this does not keep any order to the songs in the lists, but that's OK for how I'm using them.
I make "Best of..." lists using the Custom 3 field. Each Best Of song has a string in Custom 3 that begins with "zb-" (for "z best", using a letter combination that can't happen in English). Then I use a two-letter code for the chosen Artist, such as "tp" for Tom Petty. Thus, all the songs I want in the "Best of Tom Petty" list have "zb-tp" in the Custom 3 field.
The iPod Smartlists and the View Scheme that automatically creates the "Best Of..." groups have this Search qualifier:
[Custom 3]="zb" ~sort=[Track #] ~sort=[Custom 3]
There is an Artist element at the top level of the View Scheme, so if I expand the "Best of..." scheme, each artist is listed below it. That's pretty cool.
The last sort field is really nice. The "Best of Billy Joel" list includes his 4-CD superset. Since I want these in CD-order in the "Best Of..." view, I use the Custom 3 field again. Each song in BJ's set has a Custom 3 field such as "zb-bj1" for CD 1, "zb-bj2" for CD 2, and so on.
I used this even more fully by adding BJ's "The Stranger" to the collection. This has lots of good songs, and only 5-6 are on the 4-CD set. All of The Stranger's cuts happen to be on CD 1 of the set.
So, I included the songs that were only in The Stranger in the CD-1 list by making the first track of CD-1 "zb-bj1a", then "zb-bj1b", etc.. The tracks brought in from The Stranger were numbered in the Custom 3 field so they appear where I want them in the CD-1 track list. This way, I overrode the track sorting that otherwise mixed songs from The Stranger with CD-1 in odd places.
Since I can force the song order in Smartlists using the Custom 3 field, I can actually make an ordered list that is built automatically even if the file has been deleted and re-added.
So I now keep everything in my library, but I make a Smartlist called "iPod Tunes". This smartlist contains all the Artists I want on my iPod, and I exclude some albums I don't want (like I don't want all the Beatles Anthology Series on, but I want the rest of my Beatles albums).
This is another problem that I've addressed using the Custom 3 field. My particular problem comes with Steely Dan, where I have "Aja", "Countdown to Ecstacy", "Katy Lied" and other original albums. I also have "A Decade of Steely Dan" and "Show Biz Kids", two compilations. I have every track of each of them on the main computer, but the iPod doesn't need the duplciates.
So, I put "Duplicate" in the Custom 3 field, and then use "-[Custom 3]=dupl" in my version of "iPod Tunes" to exclude the duplicates from any iPod Smartlist. I always treat the track on the original album as the Original, and the compilations as Duplicates. This loses what "integrity" might be found in the compilations, but I want the integrity of the original album maintained. Should the compilation be remastered, I'll copy its audio into another file that's made part of the original album's song set, removing the track that wasn't remastered.
I've done all this because I have a tendency to delete and re-add tracks. Now I never have to update my library if I do so... all the lists are made automagically.
I do have one problem I don't see MC addressing, so I'm doing it in a plug-in. My main music set is APE files, connected using TOSLINK to my Mark Levinson system. I want the *best* files for playing on this system. I've deployed MP3 versions so my family can listen to music over the network without chewing up its bandwidth. And then there's the set of MP3's on my desktop for syncing with the iPod... cuz syncing them from files on the network takes twice the time.
My plug-in is going to sync up the tags between the Master set (APE files), the Family set (MP3) and the iPOD set (MP3). The Master and Family sets will co-sync, so that changes in either will propogate to the other. You see, my wife and kids are updating the fields to make their own Smartlists on the MP3's and I'm playing with the APE's. If there are conflicting changes the plug-in's going to have to ask the user what to do, but other than that it will sync the sets both directions when I press the Sync button. The iPod will be a "write-only" set, since the iPod can't change any data.
The plug-in is also going to extract RIFF tag information from WAV files to populate the tag fields in MC. I rip tunes from the DSS and edit them from the stream with CoolEdit, which saves tag data in RIFF format in WAV files. However, MC doesn't read the RIFF data. The plug-in will take care of this, so I can import the WAV files and populate their tags easily. It will also write Tag info into the RIFF data of the WAV files in a similar manner.
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Topic: IPOD HELP II (Read 19419 times)