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[JamieShanks]

Hi all,

First off sorry if this has been discussed before - I had a look around but couldn't see anything.

This is either a bug report, some info in case its useful for others, or a plea for help depending if anyone else has run into this and fixed it

I use iTunes 8 and MC12 side by side (one for classical music, one for everything else).  I have one of the newest model 120Gb iPod Classics.  I sync MC12's music to the iPod.  I also manually copy iTMS TV show content onto the same iPod with iTunes (I seem to need to do this to get it to play - copying with MC12 doesn't work - so presumably iTunes needs to do something security-related although I could be wrong).  I've set MC12 to sync 'all audio', and not to delete things that aren't in playlists, and iTunes not to sync automatically.  Everything works fine except the two things below, downloaded/protected TV shows play, music plays, all is good.

Except:

If I copy TV shows onto the iPod, then sync MC12, some of the TV shows get deleted - it seems like the ones with names that start similarly to each other (as if in some way the first X characters match and MC12 gets confused - except this isn't filenames as they're in different folders).  Its always the same shows that get deleted too.  Other than this everything works fine.  Is this something anyone knows how to get around? 

Also, and maybe unrelated, I seem to have wildly jumbled album art - one cover gets picked and shows up hundreds of times on lots of other albums.  I think this has only been happening since I started trying to use both iTunes and MC12 together but I'm not certain.  The cover getting picked is always among the newest but never THE newest, if you see what I mean.  Also, as far as I can tell, only the tracks first imported into MC12 are affected (the one where art is stored in the folder with the files) - lots of other ones, with embedded art from earlier use in iTunes or embedded by the stores are fine.  The option in MC12 to embed art in the tags is set, and I think all the albums affected came from music shops that don't embed art in the tags (Amie St is broken but emusic isn't, if anyone knows those two stores, iTMS tracks aren't affected).  Anyway, being specific as I'm wondering if this is likely to be related to the TV show behaviour, and if this is basically the price to pay for getting TV shows onto the iPod.  If it isn't related and is something else (like I need the art to be embedded-embedded, not just in the folder to use on an iPod), is there a way to get MC to convert all the art at once?

None of this is a big deal (I mean, I CAN just stop trying to use both programmes) - I just started playing around with it to see if it would work and now I'm being obsessive-geeky about it.

Does anyone have any thoughts about the problem, settings that I might be using wrong, that kind of thing?  Any suggestions would be gratefully recieved.

Thanks for taking a look at this,
Cheers
Jamie

[JamieShanks]

Self-bumping as the faq said it was okay to do this

[JimH]

You may need MC13 to use with the latest iPods.  It has a free 30 day trial.  Available on the MC13 board here.

We do not recommend installing iTunes now.  Each new version has some new and unpleasant surprise.

[JamieShanks]

Hey JimH, thanks for the reply.  Unfortunately not installing iTunes isn't a go unless there's another way to load protected iTunes video onto an iPod - my use of J River is constrained by that.  I wasn't neccessarily looking for a fix, just wondering if anyone else had run into this problem. 

If anyone is reading this in the future: I think the problem is something to do with artist/album naming - iTunes stores different TV shows in different folders, and presumably manages them itself on the iPod, but JRiver sees the album field as blank and dumps them all into the same folder/category/whatever, deleting the duplicates.  I'll try manually adding 'album titles' (i.e. season titles) and see if that fixes it.  Will post here if I can.

EDIT: Okay, its not the album/artist thing.  I renamed things in iTunes, which just made MC12 delete two more files than it usually did.  A bit stumped now.  Workaround is to sync MC12, then update with iTunes, then not sync MC12 again until you've watched the show.

Two asides:

iTunes likes to check for gapless playback, which (if you let it) changes the files it gapless-ifies, which makes MC12 reupload them (which I assume makes iTunes check again).  Keep an eye out for this - even if the songs on the iPod aren't in the iTunes library, it will still check.

Workaround if MC12 is automatically syncing (with 'delete not in playlist' on) to stop MC12 deleting the (surviving) iTunes files: just add the iTunes files to a playlist that's syncing.  That is, drag the file from the iPod, to a playlist on the computer, then set this playlist to sync.  Simple as that.  MC12 doesn't seem to change or move the iTunes files, so they still play, and because they're in a playlist it doesn't delete them.