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[mindracing]

I would really like MC to be a one stop 'shop' that meets all my iPOD needs.

SteveG has worked really hard on the iPOD plug-in and done a great job. I just hate to think of him twiddling his thumbs now that it seems to be fully functioning!

Please add to the list and comment as necessary.

• 1. Fully support AA files or be fully compatible with Audible manager. (Preferably the former).
• 2. Just like iPODsync, sync calendar and contacts from outlook. (Maybe a second plug-in)
• 3. Support for iPOD recording by synching the recordings folder. Auto conversion of recordings to MP3 would be good too.
• 4. Dynamic playlist support (work in progress?).
• 5. Change iPOD owner name option (as per Anapod Explorer)
• 6. Playlist group selection for synchronisation.
• 7. Synching via media server (this may already work - mentioned in another post)
• 8. Use name change option to recognise different iPODs and use the appropriate sync list for each.
• 9. Track 'bookmarking' as per Audible files for long MP3s

What else?

[neo]

mindracing, Steve, all:

* Sync time on ipod with time on computer
* Get ipod plugin to check j. river site every so often for updates

Steve:

Thanks for all of the support to date.  Because of you, I will keep using MC. :)

n

[Madcow]

A "space left" indicator on syncing that actually shows you how much space will be left.

At the moment it takes no account of whether or not the "Delete Files Not In Playlist" option is checked.  It would seem self-evident that deleting a bunch of files before adding more would result in more space being available at the end, but the iPod plugin presently takes no account of this.

[mindracing]

Thanks for the contributions. Any more? (bump).

[gpvillamil]

Three requests:

1) When the artist field is set to "Album Artist (Auto)", optionally add the Artist name to the end of the song title. For example:

In the library:

Title: Misirlou
Artist: Dick Dale
Album: Pulp Fiction (Soundtrack)

On the iPod:

Title: Misirlou - Dick Dale
Artist: (Multiple Artists)
Album: Pulp Fiction (Soundtrack)

This would allow for a tidy artist list, while not losing any information, since the iPod scrolls the song title.

2) Make the text for "(Multiple Artists)" customizable - I prefer .:. Multiple Artists .:. so that the iPod will sort it first.

3) Fix the playlist naming on the iPod. I'm actually OK with having the playlist group in parentheses after the playlist name, but I HATE the extra spaces, they look weird and awkward. Even better, find a solution that will do away with the extra stuff altogether.

Apart from that, I'm delighted with the iPod plugin. Together with MC it does practically everything I want. It is the key reason why I continue to use MC.

[RemyJ]

• Synchronize any tree object, Artist, Album, Genre, etc.
• Auto Transfer:  When you do a "send to", have the transfer (and conversion if necessary) happen in the background.

[park]

Here is a copy of my mail from the ipod thread, which Steve said he would address, pasted here lest he forget:

I've just noticed some strange behaviour with the ipod and MC. I have been listening to tunes on my ipod and haven't synched for a while. In the time since I last synched I have moved all of my files to a new hard drive (but kept the same directory structure, so the only thing that has changed is the drive letter).

When I synched my ipod just now, MC crashed upon finishing the synch. Also, looking at my files in MC I see that they havent been updated (unsurprising since the file path has changed I guess).

But I re-synched again, just to see what would happen. MC didnt crash. But it also didn't give me an error message telling me that some of the files couldnt be updated. And again the files werent updated in MC.

So my point is, that though there is a descrpency between where ipod thinks my files are and where they actually are, MC is operating like everything is working.
Infact i can view the contents of my ipod in mc and see last played info for some songs and then view the same songs on my hard drive and mc says they've never been played. So MC is neither copying the "never played" info to the ipod, nor copying the "played 1 hour ago" from the ipod to the hard drive. Yet it displays no error during synch.

My request (if possible):
When MC tries to update MC's tags with Ipod info: If the file is not found, could you make it so that a box pops up asking you where the file is (like Adobe Premiere, which also looks in the same location for subsequent files, negating the need to tell it for every file).

This would mean I could move files around my hard drive without having to re-initialize the ipopd every time.

[gbdesai]

I would love to see the ability for MC to maintain a synchronized copy of an entire library in a different file format.

For example, I have all of music in APE format, but would love to have a copy of this library that stays updated (tag info, images, etc.) in MP3 format as well.  I know you can do a convert without deleting old files, but this basically creates two versions of the files that may easily diverge from that point on.  This would not be a problem if each entry in MC could be associated with more than one file.

The iPod could be synced using the MP3 directly rather than doing a conversion on the fly.  Alternately, once a file is converted it could save that converted version for use in the future.

[bvm]

4. Dynamic playlist support (work in progress?).

That's my number one item, and I'm happy that Steve has said he's working on it.  Aside from meaning that I can have a smartlist like "lastplayed >= 1 month" and have it really work without my synching the iPod every day, it should mean (I hope) much faster synchs, since most of the playlists I synch are actually fairly simple smartlists that result in my having 3 to 4 times the number of "playlist entries" to synch as there are tracks on the iPod.

* Sync time on ipod with time on computer

I would love this - it's really pathetic how poor time the iPod keeps, and it seems that this is known to mess up last played times rather badly.  I'd be impressed if Steve could do it, though, since it's not going to be anything like reading and writing a file on the disk.  Short of a good time synch, it would be great if the plugin could notice how far off the iPod clock is (if the clock is at least readable) and compensate for it in the synch data.  Or at least have sanity checks (if he doesn't have them already) so that a synch doesn't produce wildly inaccurate data.

3) Fix the playlist naming on the iPod. I'm actually OK with having the playlist group in parentheses after the playlist name, but I HATE the extra spaces, they look weird and awkward. Even better, find a solution that will do away with the extra stuff altogether.

As the one who suggested the extra spaces, I have to comment
My objective was to have it appear, at least on the iPod's screen (which is the only place I ever look at them), almost as though the playlist group name isn't there, by taking advantage of the iPod truncating the name at somewhere around 15-20 characters.  And for that, I was hoping for at least 10, maybe 20 spaces, not just a few.  That would result in every qualified playlist having a "..." at the end, but otherwise being pretty readable.  Of course, eliminating the need to qualify the names at all would be the ideal thing.

One really simple item:

* I'd like the synch dialog to remember the expanded/unexpanded state of my playlist tree, so I can tell at a glance that it's synching the right playlists.

Less simple item:

* I'd like to be able to tell it what to put in the Name, Artist, and Album fields.  This idea is not completely well-formed in my mind.  We can already tell it one of 3 things to put in the Artist field, which means that if I always fill in the "Album Artist" field in MC, and select that as my Artist field in the plugin, I have complete control over what shows up in the Artist field.  (Well, actually, I use "Album Artist (auto)" and manually override the cases where it fills in "(Multiple Artists)", something I never want to see.)  So I'd like to generalize this to the other fields.  Why?  Because of space limitations on the iPod.  I can only see a limited number of characters in the Artist and Album fields (and the Name field in menus), since they don't scroll.  So there are lots of places where I'd like to make heavy use of abbreviations to make these fields more useful.  At the moment, my only alternative is to make the official fields abbreviated (so that they're the ones that synch), and if I want the full names available on my PC, put them in a user-defined field.  But that's only an option for use inside MC, and I'd prefer to have my mp3's tagged with the full values in the official fields, for the sake of other apps.

[SpedInFargo]

* I'd like to be able to tell it what to put in the Name, Artist, and Album fields.  This idea is not completely well-formed in my mind.  <... snip ...> So there are lots of places where I'd like to make heavy use of abbreviations to make these fields more useful.  

This is a killer idea - let me add a bit to it a bit.  One of my ideas for the Ipod (and actually the Zen Xtra before it) was to do be able to "Squishify" some words to make things fit better.  Some ideas would be to remove certain letters (vowels where necessary, change "to" to "2", etc. etc.).  Maybe for an artist name only take the first 10 characters, etc. etc. - a bunch of rules could be set up both by the user and/or built-in to the algorithm.

Some examples might be the following:

Tori Amos = ToriAmos
John Mellencamp = JonMlncamp
Adam Green = AdmGreen
Drive By Truckers = DrvByTrkrs

Of course all of these would get stored to little-used fields as to keep the "official" tags legit.

Then you could do stuff like this when you combine fields during the transfer:
Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes = ToriAmos-LtlErthquks
John Mellencamp, Human Wheels = JonMlncamp-HumanWhls
Megadeth, Countdown To Extinction = Megdth-Cntdwn2Extnction
Badly Drawn Boy, Have You Fed The Fish = BdlyDrwnBoy-HavUFedFish

And so on (create your own!  it's fun!)

I could have SWORN there was some old unix commands, etc. that would take a word in the dictionary and do a "sounds like" on it - I did some searching when I first thought of that idea and couldn't find anything...

I guess if your idea of being able to select any fields that you want to be synched to the Ipod's "main fields" - someone could theoretically write a standalone app (or an add-on to another tagging utility) to save the "squished" fields to the lesser-used fields.  Then MC could just use those fields...

Just some rambling...