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[skidoo]

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.

[skidoo]

Also I've got a phone that runs Palm OS 5.2. It has an SD slot and does a great job playing MP3s (there are several Palm apps out there for this; I use Pocket Tunes Pro).

I've got a 512MB SD card that I use just to carry around a subset of my tunes. This gets changed quite frequently. It would be awesome if I could synch this too. Popping the card in a reader makes it show up as a removeable drive, just like the Archos Jukebox Recorder handheld. And again, the directory hierarchy (or at least from the "music" node on down) is a must.

There must be some way to accomplish this?!

[skidoo]

And I know we were given the heads-up about the re-vamping of handheld support and how support for some players is broken, at least for the time being. Is suport for removable drives broken two?

And the context menu items that appear when you right-click the drive only seem to (sort of) work if you subsequently click "Synchronize" from that same menu. I.e., they have no effect on the synch operation if you click "Transfer" in the action window.

[SteveG]

skidoo,

If you are using sync to transfer the files, try right clicking on the drive letter and use "Select Root Directory" to set a base path for all your files. Use rearrange upload folders to have MC automatically create a given path based on tag information.

If you SD card shows up as a removable drive, you should be able to do whatever you can with your Archos.

The warnings on handhelds will be removed in the next build.

The option for 'Setting root directory' does not work with drag and drop because the presumption is that you will drop the files on the appropriate path in the tree.

Steve

[skidoo]

skidoo,

If you are using sync to transfer the files, try right clicking on the drive letter and use "Select Root Directory" to set a base path for all your files. Use rearrange upload folders to have MC automatically create a given path based on tag information.

Yes, but then my playlists are screwed up and I have to grep the paths to conform to the new base path.

The option for 'Setting root directory' does not work with drag and drop because the presumption is that you will drop the files on the appropriate path in the tree.

But it doesn't apply either if you drop them into the handheld frame of the action menu (which doesn't appear to let you set any path information).

I want to be able to copy songs from my HD to my handheld, and preserve (from a certain level) the folder structure, and I want to be able to copy playlists and have them automatically updated with the new base path on the fly.

[Inst_tech]

I am having similar issues with MJ 8.0

My directory structure is genre\artist\album\title

If there is a way, or a plug in somewhere that I am unaware of, that would allow me to use the "Send To" right mouse click command to retain some of the directory structure, that would be awesome.  When I try and transfer to my Lyra MP3 player it dumps it in the root directory, and it is a pain in the arse.

Right now I am down to dragging and dropping in windows itself, but if there is a way to do this in MJ then I would more than willing to do it there....


Thanks
Mike

[Rob L]

I did actually raise this on a thread some way back, but the thread just died away without a response at the time.

I actually gave up on using MC to do the synchronisation because I found it far more trouble than it was worth, so I don't know if it's changed since, but at the time, the options to "rearrange upload folders" weren't anything like good enough. Clearly MC has very flexible control over how the paths are created when you rip stuff, but the "rearrange upload folders" options for handhelds were far more restricted. It certainly didn't use to be possible to get the handheld to have the files stored in an Album Artist\Album structure, which is what I want to use.

I seem to remember too that I couldn't get the playlists to work properly either because of the way it created the paths inside them, but I never really investigated it because as I say, I found the synchronisation just didn't work well enough for me.

[Inst_tech]

I am not sure how it works in MC, but in MJ, you can change the folder structure when you burn data CD, but when you want to upload to a handheld device (ie my mp3 player), it just sends it to the root, and I don't think there is a darn thing I can do about it....

[Bill Kearney]

I'll second the "too much trouble in MC" perspective.   The phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none" keeps coming to mind with MC11.  I love it and all but it seems to have FAR too many rough edges on FAR too many features to be even CLOSE to release candidate stage.  But hey, maybe it's just me being picky....

I've got an MP3 player that takes SD cards, a Nokia 6630 cell phone that takes RS-MMC cards and an iPod.  I'm here to tell you NOTHING in sync software works well so it's not just that MC11 is missing the mark.  They're ALL missing the mark.  Mainly because it's far too wide a target to really hit.  WMP10 gets pretty close but it lacks any device-specific syncing options.  This is crucial to any real-world situations.  Either because a user has more than one device to sync or that there's more than one user in MC each syncing to their own device(s).  The feature matrix is a nightmare.