I am about to purchase an iPhone so I started this thread is to discuss your iPhone / iTouch Syncing Methods.
Searching these forums, it appears there will always be issues because Apple is a closed system. Any firmware updates may break what was working. I have decided that for the method to work reliably I will be using a virtual handheld folder and iTunes to sync the iPhone.
I have a HTPC with a minimal Windows XP installed, MC11 for music and TheaterTek for DVD. My music is all FLAC and the album art all scanned and photoshop touched up 1417 x 1417, 300dpi. There is no junk on this computer. I only use it for media playback. I never go out on the internet or do any other work on this PC. Naturally I won’t be installing iTunes on this computer!
My home office PC is my regular work PC. Since I will be using iTunes to sync Outlook calendar and contacts to my iPhone then I may as well use it to sync audio as well. This PC will contain a folder for iPhone MP3’s. That folder will be shared on the network and my HTPC will map that folder and create a virtual handheld on it. I realize I will be syncing over the network but only the first sync will take a long time and who cares as I will just let it run while I am sleeping. Subsequent syncs won’t take very long as I don’t change what I sync to my handheld that often.
There has been talk about Cover Art Shinkrage option for handhelds (
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=41675.0). Even if this is going to be implemented I won’t be using it. It can’t see it being better than the algorithms that Photoshop use to re-sample images. Adobe have invested years of R&D into things like that. I will have two images for all my album art. One will be the high resolution one that MC will use. The other will be a smaller/lower resolution one for embedding into MP3’s. Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have a batch convert so I can create all the smaller images with just a few mouse clicks.
For the handheld sync setup, I will be specifying the path of an executable for the external encoder. This will be a script that invokes LAME, passing it the file name of the album art to embed in the MP3. Starting with with LAME 3.98b4 you can embed album art.
--ti <file> audio/song albumArt (jpeg/png/gif file, 128KB max, v2.3)
Questions:
I would prefer not to have to embed the album art in an MP3. But I have not found out if iTunes supports something like the folder.jpg of MC. If anyone knows please let me know.
The iPhone screen has a resolution of 480x320. Does the iPhone use the entire 480x320 for displaying the Album Art or is part of the screen used for something else? What I am asking is what is the optimal resolution album art I should be aiming for? I want it to be exact, I don’t want iTunes or the iPhone to degrade the images by doing any further re-sampling on them. 320x320 would be the logical thing since that is square.