Running version 9.0077, plug-in dated 10/13/02
Steve:
Stellar progress, really. Here's what I've go to report.
1. Was still getting crashes when trying to access my iPod as formatted by ephpod. I was eventually able to get to the format for MJ, and could not repeat the problem. Don't know how much time you're going to spend on this one, I don't think too many folks would have a problem with wiping their iPod the first time they use MJ.
2. The synching works really great, but as you pointed out, it's totally playlist-centric. I don't think you need to change the interface, just add checkboxes for Artist>Album, I don't recommend going down to individual tracks, that would take too much. It was interesting that you have the Auto-smartlist checkboxes defaulted. From a UI perspective, that didn't make too much sense. You can't uncheck them, but you aren't required to check any of their children, so why force it to be checked? Minor UI issue.
3. While synching I noticed some, well, idiosyncrasies (sorry
). First off, at different times during synch, the MJ would lose focus and the status dialog would stop updating. It would eventually complete, but that's a little bug that should be addressed. I also found a couple of instances where I selected multiple playlists to synch and it didn't copy all of them over, I wasn't able to replicate that consistently though. The synching doesn't seem too stable. I'm doing it now, and I pulled up a browser to type this, if I go back to MJ (which is apparently synching, I have a white screen in the middle of MJ where my browser was. The synching dialog is there, but it's just white.
4. I did notice a bug (you've probably got this on your list) when you delete songs. If you delete them from your iPod and then go expand the Album/Artist or Genre items, you will still see the Artists or Albums or Genres present, even though you deleted them. To replicate, select all the songs on your iPod (from the root of the drive), then delete them, then expand the Artist item. You should still see Artists there even though you've just deleted everything. A quick "Rebuild Database from iPod" fixes this, but I still see it as a bug.
4. I noticed that "Year" shows up in the grid when viewing ipod songs, but it's always "0". Does the ipod db even store that? If it doesn't why even show it. If it does, it's not getting populated correctly, or MJ isn't displaying it correctly.
6. With repect to the synch UI, when you get to adding Artists/Albums, I would envision it to work such that If you select an Artist, it automatically selects all the albums; however, if you expand the Artist and select one or more of their Albums then Artist checkbox becomes defaulted to checked.
7. Another issue with Synching, seems to me that when I do a synch there should be an option to check (either in Plugin Options or better yet, right in the Synch Dialog) that allows me to specify whether songs on the iPod but NOT present in the items I've chosen to synch should be deleted from the iPod or left on it.
OK, this last one is a biggy to me:
8. One thing that is going to HUGELY important w/respect to synching is that selections I make when I synch should be remembered so the next time I synch I don't have to re-click all the Playlists/Artists/Albums I want on my iPod. I only have to check new items to synch or uncheck items I don't want synched. optionThis gets to be really important when you synch w/Artists or Albums.
That's probably a bit much...but I've been hanging back for a while. Great progress.
Adam