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[Nolonemo]

Now that I understand the Nomad Zen plugin better, I want even more.  The ability to map either the file name or track name to the Zen track field and to map artist, album artist or album artist (auto) to the Zen artist field when transferring is really great.  I'd like to see it expanded to be able to map MC fields (including user defined fields) to the Zen album field.

Let me explain.  Because the Zen only does a 2-level sort (ie click on genre and you get a list of all the albums in that genre) as compared to MC9 which can do a 3-level sort (eg, click on genre to show all artists in genre, and then on selected artist to show all albums by that artist) I have to prefix all my album names in the Zen with the artist name so I can tell which artist that "greatest hits" or "symphony no. 1" album belongs to (i.e. "artist - greatest hits vol. 1"), since I have almost 50GB on the sucker and hundreds of artists.  That works (sort of) in the Zen, but looks wierd in MC9 (I also abbreviate stuff in the album names for the Zen which isn't necessary in MC9).

What I've done is to create a user defined field in MC9 ("AAlbum") which contains the true album name, while the "Album" field contains the edited "artist-album" name for the Zen.  Then in MC9 I display AAlbum instead of Album in my Media Library column display so I see just the album name.  This works OK, except that what the actual file tag contains is the wierd edited album name instead of the actual album name (which travels with the file therefore).  So if I give the file to anyone else or try to play it outside of MC9, the album name is the Zen-edited one, not the real name.

Now if I could map AAlbum to the Zen Album field when I transfer files to the Zen, I could keep the Zen-edited name in that field and keep the actual album name stored in the Album field (and in the file tag itself), keeping the files and tags pristine, so to speak, while being able to send the Zen-edited tags to the Zen when I transferred.

You can tell I'm spending way too much time on organizing and tagging here!!  OK, thanks for listening.

[loraan]

Well, heck--as long as we're wishing (and I'm not being entirely sarcastic here), why not have the arbitrary ability to map any MC field to any Zen field on transfer? So you could set Artist on the Zen to Album Artist and Album on the zen to "Album Year - Album", etc...

That'd be cool!

[SteveG]

Thanks for the suggestions.  Dynamic mapping of fields for Portables is a good idea and we will look to implement it in MC 10, but there are some other things to resolve first. Thanks for the ideas.

Steve