Ooh, good show, Ash! (Howdy, btw!)
It'd be boss to be able to synch with either folders, playlists, or specific albums/artists/songs in your library. Synching with playlists and
smartlists would, in my opinion, be the most important, since that's how I personally do it (hehe)... I've got about a dozen smartlists that I export and synch with... updated daily it provides some nice music variety.
It's true that XPlay/Ephpod are limited in scope when it comes to re-transferring songs. I believe (though I could be wrong) that XPlay only scans for changes in the Artist, Album, or Title tags. If it finds differences there, it will re-synch the song.
One possibility would be to somehow use the actual file's modification date. That way,
any change would be synched. However, I dunno if that's the best idea... I'm not sure what all is kept inside the file. Album art, playlist membership, playcounts, and stuff could trigger unwanted synch-updates. I guess that if I had my way (and my vodka is telling me that I do!), songs would re-synch to the iPod if there were changes in:
- Standard iPod tags: Artist, Album, Title, Genre, or Composer
- File size changes (say I've re-ripped the CD at a higher/lower bitrate)
- Song duration (say I've cut the last two seconds of silence off that was accidentally encoded)
However, that could make synchs agonizingly long, as the plugin scans all those files for differences. Perhaps file modification date would be best?
Something to definately watch out for: Ephpod used to only copy/update one instance of a song. Say I have a song that exists on two different albums (like a greatest hits album and the original album) -- It would only copy the song up once, and it wouldn't populate the database with both instances. I've got 4 identical copies of the same mp3 (same filesize on all 4 files), tagged to 4 different albums. I'd expect to see 4 copies of that song in their respective albums on my iPod.
While I'm at it, here's to you, Steve:
Cheers!