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[neovibe]

An option to consider: maybe it would be easier to attack the problem from a different angle.  How about sycing the MC library with the iTunes library?  That way we could manage all of our media with MC and fall back to iTunes for syncing. Not perfect, but workable.

I'm thinking of getting an ipod Touch and as far as I found searching these forums, ipod Touch support isn't yet official (right?) and isn't 100% reliable (data loss possibility).
That's why your solution seems interesting, the only challenge being how to automate the sync between the MC library and the iTunes library and making this process fast and reliable.

How do you (or anyone else) do this? any particular trick?

by the way, any news on how good the touch sync is working??

thanks in advance!

[Doof]

isn't 100% reliable (data loss possibility).

I haven't lost any data. The only "bad" thing that's happened is that I've had to restore from iTunes to get all of the disk space back after a failed sync. It's really not that big of a deal.

With that said, I haven't yet had a really successful sync yet. There's something funky going on with MC's estimate of how much space I'll need not jiving with how space is actually used. So if you put a lot of stuff on it, it may fill the whole iTouch up and then MC crashes. The result is an iTouch with no more room on it, but no music shows up. But if I only transfer a few things, it's fine. And now that they've fixed the Initializing of the iTouch from within MC, even when it gets filled up like that, it's a piece of cake to wipe it and try again. I haven't touched iTunes in quite a while.

[neovibe]

According to an update from the MC Team "MC now has basic support for both Touch and iPhone".
[I'll keep the 1st post unchanged so that Doof's answer keeps making sense]

Can I just ask what the difference is between "supporting iPod touch" and having "basic support".
What is missing and how long can it take?
Is it just what's reported here? http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=45467.0
(sorry for being so picky but an iPod touch is pretty expensive regarding the Gb/$ ratio and I'm not leaving MC12)

About the situation when the smartlist to be syncronized exceeds the capacity of the iPod, what should happen in normal circumstances?
This is particularly important when that smartlist contains both mp3's (l'll want them unchanged) and flac+cue (will necessarily be split and compressed to mp3 during the sync process) - in this situation I have no way of knowing how big the smartlist will be on the ipod.

I can control the size of the smartlist before the encoding but not predict the size after;
I can control the length (time) of the smartlist but there's no direct relation to it's size after part of it is compressed;
remember it's all dynamic and I'm trying to automate it as much as possible. any ideas?

big thanks in advance

[Doof]

Can I just ask what the difference is between "supporting iPod touch" and having "basic support".

By basic support, I think they just mean that it's not really complete yet. Some things that should or will work eventually don't yet, like transferring tag changes (like ratings or play stats) back to MC, for instance. Basic support basically means "It'll put files on the iTouch".

What is missing and how long can it take?
Is it just what's reported here? http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=45467.0

Yeah, pretty much that's all of the known issues.

About the situation when the smartlist to be syncronized exceeds the capacity of the iPod, what should happen in normal circumstances?
This is particularly important when that smartlist contains both mp3's (l'll want them unchanged) and flac+cue (will necessarily be split and compressed to mp3 during the sync process) - in this situation I have no way of knowing how big the smartlist will be on the ipod.

I can control the size of the smartlist before the encoding but not predict the size after;
I can control the length (time) of the smartlist but there's no direct relation to it's size after part of it is compressed;
remember it's all dynamic and I'm trying to automate it as much as possible. any ideas?

You're right. That is always the trick. One thing that MC does now is that once it's converted a flac file to mp3, it can store that file alongside your flac file and "stack" it with the original. So it doesn't really show up in the library (although you can get to it if you need to), but it's there, and any tag changes that are done to the original automatically carry over to the mp3. Once it has that file available to it, I'm guessing it'll be able to more intelligently determine how big the contents of the transfer will be. What I did was to create a virtual handheld and had MC sync my entire library to it. That way, for every lossless file in my library, there is now a corresponding lossy version, so I don't have to worry about MC having to guess how much space it will need, or wait for it convert stuff when I sync.

There are a lot of threads in the MC12 forum about the stacks feature if you have any questions. There's also an article about them in the wiki. It's unfortunately a little more in depth than I have to time to get into right now.

[neovibe]

Well, having a compressed version of all my library is out of question (170gb of mp3+lossless) but as I will get an iTouch with either 8Gb or 16Gb, having just an “image” of what’s in my ipod (8 or 16gb big) is a possibility. Then I would sync the ipod to that playlist. It’s about the same as your solution, the only difference being I’d create a lossy image of just the part of my library I want on the ipod.

Whether stacks is the best option for doing that I am yet to explore (still don’t know much about it).
I'll explore it

[Doof]

the only difference being I'd create a lossy image of just the part of my library I want on the ipod.

That's how I did it at first, too. But then I realized that I didn't know what music my fiancee would want on her iPod and I had the drive space, so I figured why not and just created the lossy version for everything. If drive space becomes an issue I can always delete it later. Or buy another hard drive.