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[loraan]

Of course, having sent kudos about how good the Nomad plug-in is now, I've also got a feature request about how it could be better! Take it for whatever you like...

It would be really cool if there were some sort of dynamic search-and-replace tag functionality when transferring. For example, I use Album Artist for all my files. If it's a single artist album, then Album Artist = Artist. If it's a multi-artist album, then Album Artist = the compiler or producer, or "Multiple Artists" in some cases, and Artist is the artist of the individual tracks. Naturally.

But the Nomads don't support Album Artist--just Artist. So it would be nice if I could tell MC to copy Album Artist to Artist on-the-fly during transfer.

Another example: maybe your player doesn't support dates for files, but it does support genres (like the Zen), so you tell MC to copy date to genre on-the-fly. Or you tell MC to set Genre = Genre - Year. Or you say something like "if albumartist != artist then artist = albumartist - artist". Whatever.

[SteveG]

Loraan,

This is a great suggetion. I actually have recently seen it regarding a similar issue with iPods. It is on my to-do list and should appear soon.

Steve

[loraan]

It occurs to me that synchronization becomes more complicated with this option because duplicate detection isn't guaranteed. If I transfer files, then change my "tag-on-the-fly" settings, the same file could get transferred with different properties. I really don't see a way around this, though--in fact, maybe it's a good thing!

[LonWar]

What version of the Nomad do you have?? 2 or 3.

[loraan]

Zen.

[SteveG]

loraan,

Thanks for the thoughts.  The problem you identify is progressively a bigger and bigger pain.  I have been battling it for a while and am near solving it in the following way.  Here is a solution and tell me what you think.  

MC has a unique index number for every song. I solved many issues with the iPod by using this number as the filename on the iPod. I could do a similar thing with Nomad, but this will cause problems for people who switch back and forth between applications or who want descriptive information in the filename or who don't start from a clean Nomad Jukebox and use our plugin. If I don't worry about these issues, everything else becomes easier.

Steve

[loraan]

The solution you propose is a good one, but it might not work on certain players. If I understand the Nomad file structure correctly, files are renamed to a unique "index number" by the Nomad driver upon transfer. The Nomad builds a database of artist/album/genre information during transfer, and the database uses the index number to access the files. This is why you can't just drag-and-drop files on a Nomad like it was a USB drive.

Ostensibly, this database/index structure makes the Nomad faster at browsing a library than a player that has to read the tags from the files in real time.

Now, I'm no programmer, but I infer from this that the Nomad driver doesn't let the programmer set the filename on the device directly. I infer that the programmer tells the Nomad driver what the Album, Artist, Genre, Year, and other tags are for the file, but he's got no control over the actual name or structure of music files. To make matters worse, I don't think Nomad supports custom tags of any sort, so you'd be stuck re-using an existing tag for the MC index.

Nomad works around this by detecting duplicates when Album, Artist, and Title are the same for any two tracks. Unfortunately, filename doesn't matter because filename on the player is controlled by the driver.

But if I'm wrong, and you _CAN_ set the file name on the Nomad, then this is a great idea.