I've hunted through this forum, and I can't find an answer to my question.
I have an Archos Jukebox FM Recorder handheld MP3 player. It shows up as a removeable drive in Windows and as a handheld device in MC.
(the volume name is "JUKEBOX;" I think that was the default).
My music files are stored on a hard drive according to the following rule:
\media\managed\music\[artist]\[album]\[artist] - [song title].mp3
For example, "Jimmy Jazz" by the Clash is stored like this:
\media\managed\music\The Clash\London Calling\The Clash - Jimmy Jazz.mp3
In the past, to get music onto my handheld, I just selected the "music" directory (on my hard drive) and copied it to the removable drive corresponding to my handheld. This would of course just overwrite the "music" directory that was already there. Then I would export PLS files from MC, do a quick search-and-replace in each to fix the paths, and copy the new playlist files over.
This process works fine, but it is time-consuming and somewhat tedious. And recently I've been using my portable a lot more, and also acquiring new music and creating new playlists at a much faster rate. Enter MC's synchronization functionality.
So here's my question:
Can MC synch music with my handheld and preserve the relative path of my song files? That is, I'd like to grab a view scheme or smartlist (e.g. "All Music") from MC's tree and copy all the selected files over to my handheld, while preserving their paths inside of a "music" directory. I want to retain the folder hierarchy of music\[artist]\[album]. And of course I'd like the paths in any synchronized playlists to be updated accordingly.
Based on my experiments, it seems to me that copying the files from Media Center will result in them always ending up in the root directory of the handheld. This is very inconvenient, for the following reasons:
1. For ad-hoc playing, I'd rather scroll through a few hundred artist names as opposed to 4500+ song titles.
2. There are critical operating system files and subdirectories hanging off the root directory. I don't want to accidentally delete one of these while trying to delete a song.
Does anyone know of a way to accomplish my goal?
Thanks in advance.