I've been trying for the past 4 days to get my new iPod classic working with media center. So far it has been nothing but frustration - after the latest attempt it looks like I'm going to have to start completely from scratch
I initially had a bunch of problems syncing my whole library to the iPod - the upload process would crash about halfway through, and it looked like MC wasn't saving the cache progress (my library is 90% FLAC). OK, I say, I'll build the cache first, then try to transfer everything.
Building the cache separately also was a major headache, with one corrupt file bogging down the whole process. But it finished "successfully" in the end.
I say "successfully", because when I went to transfer songs to the iPod, MC still had to convert (reconvert?) about 20-30% of the songs in my library.
I came back to the machine to find the sync appeared to have completed. Yay! Except that once I eject the iPod it reports zero songs. Doh! What's worse, MEDIA CENTER DELETED THE ENTIRE CACHE. Yup, all 45GB worth of shiny new MP3 files. Gone. Gotta start the whole thing over.
Right now I'm trying to sync about 50 albums at a time. This is an annoying manual process, and I'm still not sure if it's going to work.
I totally understand the difficulty in getting a device like the iPod to work with MC, especially given that Apple (we hate our customers) tried to lock everything down. Bugs and hiccups will occur, I know that.
HOWEVER, I see two major design flaws in how MC handles the iPod.
1. Why would MC delete the handheld cache? MC should be able to link multiple files to the same record in the database, something I initially suggested over 3 years ago:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=18852.msg130614#msg130614Alternatively, MC could add in support for Matroska and have multiple file types embedded that way, something I suggested here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=31857.msg231240#msg231240Perhaps these features could be part of MC 13? With a growing trend towards media being used on multiple (and often incompatible) devices, the ability to store media in multiple formats for multiple uses is pretty important. One thing is clear, the current cache system is at best a hack. There's absolutely no reason that an app should delete nearly 50GB worth of perfectly good data. In addition, from everything that I've read, the cache doesn't handle tag updates at all - reconvert the entire audio file just to change a few bytes of metadata?
2. The iPod sync needs some sort of checkpoint process. If the sync process is unreliable (which it appears to be, as I've seen from other posts), there really needs to be an option to "lock in" progress as the sync is taking place. MC should batch process files to the iPod in smaller chunks - say 1-5 GB - transfer files and then update the library. Smaller transfers appear to be more reliable than doing the whole thing at once, and if something goes wrong, at least most of the progress can be saved rather than the current situation where I have an iPod with 40 GB worth of files on it that aren't usable because MC never got around to the database update stage.