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[Brana]

Okay. I finally splurged for one of these puppies after having many problems with my nomad. I've followed all the instructions in handhelds regarding buying MacOpener 2000 and installing it. Alls fine. When I send mp3s to that device throguh MJ all seems to transfer fine and in exploring the ipod drive after through windows explorer I can seee the music files on there, BUT when I accesss the Ipod through it's OS to play them the files are not "there" to be played. It doesn not seem to see them although the avaialble space has decreased through the system properties. Is there a crucial step I have missed here? Help Please!!

[Steve]

Brana,

The MacOpener solution will allow you to move files to and from your Ipod, but will not allow them to be played on your IPod.  A user suggested this solution to us, but we do not have an IPod here so we did not realize that this solution would not include the ability to play the files.

With this in mind, we have pulled the link to the IPod from our webpage. We are in contact with a company called MediaFour which is releasing a product called XPlay that should solve the IPod / PC problem and allow files transferred from a PC to be played on the IPod. XPlay is available as an Alpha release at http://www.mediafour.com/products/xpod/ and maybe it can be used to connect MJ to the IPod. We have not tested this solution but plan to.

If you have further questions or concerns, please email me at steve@jriver.com.

Thanks,

Steve

[brasfild]

B --

if you have already shelled out for macopener, go ahead and download ephpod (www.ephpod.com) It is a fairly stable way of connecting to your ipod. Personally, I prefer xplay's integration with explorer, but... You won't be able to 'sync' or get anything out of mediajukebox (cept the creation of playlists), but it'll allow you to use your ipod.

I hope that something comes of work between MJ & Media4 (the xplay people), it'd be great to see the products work together...

[Steve]

brasfild,

We have a conference call set up with Media4 later today to try to work something out.

[brasfild]

Steve,

That's great to hear! I hope that we can get the best jukebox player and the most stylish/functional mp3 player to talk with one another. I've been using MJ8 for a while now, will be happy to give you feedback on the interface.

Cheers,
Ted

[brasfild]

Steve,

That's great to hear! I hope that we can get the best jukebox player and the most stylish/functional mp3 player to talk with one another. I've been using MJ8 for a while now, will be happy to give you feedback on the interface.

Cheers,
Ted

[Steve]

Ted,

FYI, the conversation with MediaFour seemed to go well. We are having another discussion later this week to try to work out some details.

[Ted Brassfield]

Thanks for pursuing this. I hope that the discussions with media4 are still going well. I'd love to see the ipod integrated into v8, but whatever you can arrange will be fantastic.

Cheers,
Ted

[wellch]

So, did the discussions with mediafour go any further?
Integrating media jukebox with my ipod would make me very very happy indeed.
At the moment it's all horribly manual and painful.

cheers,
Chris

[Steve]

Chris,

We have not heard from MediaFour for a while.  The ball is in their court at this point. I think they may be swamped trying to meet their release deadline. We can try contacting them again and hopefully make some progress.

[jenningsjason]

Another solution might be ephpod. Check the link here:

http://www.ephpod.com/

I don't have an IPod so I don't know whether it would work or not. Still, it's worth a try.

Steve - is there any chance of JRiver integrating Ephpod support into Media Jukebox? The only thing holding me back from picking up an Ipod is the incomplete integration into Media Jukebox.

[Steve]

Jenningsjason,

It is possible. We also don't have an IPOD to test but let me look Ephpod over tomorrow and see if there is a chance it might work out.  I will post again tomorrow.

Steve

[Cotton-Eyed Loo]

I too would buy an iPod if I could use it with MJ8. Apple?

[Steve]

The EphPod idea might work. If anyone has an IPod and MJ and can give some feedback to me, that would be great(steve @ jriver.com). If not, I will see if we can pick one up so we can do some testing.

[Ted Brassfield]

I've had slightly less success with EPHPod than with Xplay thus far, though I am definitely open to any option that will integrate MJ8 & my IPod! It is possible to work around, but I would like to be able to automatically sync my top hits or any smartlist that I come up with... Anyway, still open for other options.

[Chris]

Hi All,

I tried out ephpod - and it was faster and easier to use than xplay. But it trashed my pc every time I tried to reboot. After three fresh restores I gave up and went back to xplay. Make sure you have your system backed up before trying it!

I would have thought that mediafour would have jumped at the chance to team up with mj and steal a march on their competitors. But I guess they are busy just trying to get their software good enough to pay for. It's a shame, for me this would be a killer combo.

I guess we'll have to wait and see if the apple rumour's are true....

cheers,
Chris

[Kurt Young]

To back up what Steve has said, MacOpener (and other programs such as MacDrive) only allow your PC to talk to your iPod as if it were a removable hard drive - not a music player.  If you send music to it, you are in effect copying the mp3's to the root of the iPod as data, not as music that can be played.  The iPod has a "music folder" that requires a program like EphPod or XPlay to talk to it.  I've never tried EphPod, but I hear that you have to have MacOpener to make it work, so it seems like a viable solution for you.

I use XPlay to put music on my iPod.  It's fan-freakin-tastic.  I use MJ8 to tag and organize my music, and to create playlists.  Then I export those playlists to .m3u's (a process that could use a little upgrade -- things like auto-synching of mj playlists to external m3u's would be sweet), and then I use XPlay to send those playlists to my iPod.  Works like a charm.

It's true that Mediafour is working their butts off trying to get XPlay ready for their release date.  They're currently in beta3 r1, and the beta will expire on 23 June.  Just by looking through some of the posts in their beta forum, you can totally get the sense of urgency coming from them.  It's a great program so far.  You can find their forums here:  http://www.mediafour.com/forums

Rock on, iPodders!

[Cotton-Eyed Loo]

So..... the xplay software has been released http://www.mediafour.com/products/xplay/

I assume I'll need something in addition to their software to make this work. Anyone working on this?

My SO has got an ipod, so I may go buy a firewire card this weekend and try it out. The $30 for the xplay is lost if I can't make it work - the firewire card is returnable for 30 days (thanks Fry's - you guys ROCK).

[Brana]

Yes, after no success with Macopener by itself, I did stumble upon Xplay by MediaFour. It's awesome and it works wonderfully and I've purchased the official release which works with no problems. The biggest mental stumbling block was understanding the syncronization idea as I was so used to just taking an album and sending it to my jukebox (before i had the ipod)in MJ and in a way treating the jukebox like a hard drive where i could add files and delete them. The sync feature forces you to preselect what albums are to reside on the ipod, so there's this list or TOC in a way that you would update and it would in turn make sure only those directories from your hard drive were uploaded to the ipod. There is a way as well to drag a directory off of your drive (which in my case corresponds to an album) and copy it over to the ipod explorer style. Keep in mind that it is during this process that a translation seems to occur which allows the ipod to "see" these files as music mp3 files as opposed to just regular data files which you can also send to the ipod for storage like a hard drive. It would be nice at some point if I could do all this from MJ, but it is not too much of a inconvenience running both programs at once. I can currently be ripping a new CD in MJ, listening to mp3s in MJ and sending songs to the ipod via firewire using Xplay all at the same time!

[Cotton-Eyed Loo]

Wow - PUSH. updated interact site - okay - POP.

Hmm the xplay thing is not what I was hoping for. I'd like to be able to define a playlist and drag/sync it onto the device and not worry about the location of files in directories etc.

sigh

[Ted Brassfield]

How are things working out with XPlay 1.0? I haven't tried xplay since the last of the betas/t-releases...

I just tried the latest ephpod with their 15 day trial of macopener -- it does what I want it to. I exported a playlist from MJ8 and started up ephpod, imported the playlist and it took all the files and now they are residing properly in my ipod. During the import, ephpod even told me when I had an improperly tagged file and it allowed me to fix the tag on my original mp3 file.

After the warnings on this thread, I restarted my machine several times, no problems (running xp-pro on a dell latitude).

It'd be nice to have a true sync between MJ8 and either xplay or ephpod, but this workaround will function for now (or at least the next 15 days).

-Ted Brassfield

[Steve]

Thanks for the information Ted and sorry to rehash my email to you..

FYI to all iPod lovers, our plan for now will be to wait and see if Apple releases a Software Developers Kit for the iPod in August. There was some information about this in some other threads and based on that information, it appears that a release in August could happen. Our preference would be to work with them directly.  If this is hopelessly delayed then our next best option will be to try to work with Ephpod because XPlay has not been cooperative yet.

We are committed to getting a Plug-in for iPod and will keep working on this.

Steve