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[kiwi]

I've been away for too long   and have just started to use MC again.  Too much travel and not enough time in one place to actually use it.  That said, it looks like iPod sync'ing is now working reasonably well and I'm thinking about using MC for my iPod sync needs, however, I have one issue which is that my entire collection is stored as APE's. 

This leaves me two options for syncing:
1. I encode my tracks on the fly as they are added to the iPod
2. I encode everything as MP3 and then transfer those to the iPod.

These both have advantages and disadvantages.  Option one's big advantage is the I only have to maintain ONE library.  Its disadvantage seems to be that it is very very slow to convert 500 songs from APE to MP3.

The second option fixes the speed issues but then leaves the nightmare of maintaining two different libraries and trying to keep them in sync.

What I would love to do is allocate X amount of space for MC to use to keep a cache or all the songs that it has encoded, then if it had already encoded the song, sync'ing would happen very quickly.  This cache could even be prepopulated if the user selected some option.  I know this wouldn't work in some situations where users are limited by space, however, if you are going to have a large collection of losslessly encoded music, space should not be an issue and speed/performance might well be preferable.

I could easily see allocating 100gb (or more) of space for this purpose. 

Other advantages that I could see with doing this is that now music could be streamed w/o having to convert it and I could sync to my laptop from this collection very easily.

Just a thought/feature request going forward (or even better, a feature that has already been added that I am just unaware of.)

Keep up the awesome work, I love 11.1 now that I've been using it again and can't wait for 12.

-kiwi

[JimH]

Welcome back, kiwi.  We'd like to do something like that, but I'm not sure when.

For now, if you choose to encode as you upload, it will take a long time the first time, but less when you sync again.

[kiwi]

I'm very glad to hear that it's on the list of features.  I guess that it would only be used by the power user side, but I know that I'd have my dad just using MC and not popping back and forth into ITunes if it was speedier.

I assume that the "speed benefit" on successive sync's happens when you are only sync'ing the new songs?   

Unfortunately, I generally have a rather large turnover when I sync.  My iPod mini doesn't have that much space and probably half to two thirds of it gets updated each time.  It's less painful for my larger iPod's, though, it would be very nice if after sync'ing the 60gb, all those tracks were ready to dump onto my mini

Hope it happens sooner rather than later.

-kiwi

[kiwi]

Another thought... a but farther out there, would be to have APEs support multiple versions of the song.  Sort of akin to the way a PNG can have multiple resolutions of an image.  I'd be psyched to have an APE that had an MP3 as part of it (And whatever else one wanted, OGG/WMP).  Sure you add 10% to the total size of your collection, you now have done all of your convertions (or could do them in batch at a later point) and managing them would be very easy.  In particular, you'd only have one set of tags to manage.

I guess I should really go over to the Monkeys Audio forum and post this over there. 

-kiwi

[BullishDad]

I'd love to see a feature like this too.  It's been discussed before, and you can read more http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=31857.msg232002#msg232002