Yippee!!! I'm heading off for Spain in early April and was hoping to be able to haul more songs on my iPod - now there's hope. By the way Steve, I'm sorry I didn't get back to you more quickly, but I travel quite a bit and read the board whenever I get the chance. It just happens that I was on the road when you posted your note to me...
- Keeps track of changes to the original file and associated tags to prevent it from performing transcoding of each song with every sync unless there's a change.
Transcoding currently does not occur during synching. It is only an option when clicking on "Upload". Only files that are a different file type or bitrate transcode. Also if Normalization is checked the file will transcode. This data is stored in the file, so if you want to only do it once, make copies of the files that you will use for sending to iPod that are the type and bitrate and normalization that you want.
Yup, know all about uploading vs. syncing and therein lies the desirement. In a upload, I don't get any playlists, but I can squeeze a lot more songs onto my iPod, which in turn drives me to need playlists even more. Or I can synchronize, a much more elegant solution, but then I have to settle for about half the number of songs I could carry on my iPod with lower, but still reasonable fidelity.
I currently have almost 100 gig of MP3s encoded at 320 bps, all of it done with Media Center. I opted to go with the highest quality because I'm planning to tie my computer into my whole-house stereo system later this summer and want to come as close as possible to approximating the original song. With over 10,000 songs, I regularly find little errors here and there (misspellings and such) and really don't want to take on managing two libraries (a main one for the house and a secondary one for my iPod), not to mention the additional disk space that it would require. Since, MP3 stereo components are getting more popular and less expensive, I figure that the way I'm trying to set things up won't be unique.
My hope was that since you already had the transcoding feature built and debugged, tying it into the sync feature wouldn't be too hard to do. And since the transcoding process is so slow, a flag would prevent transcoding files that hadn't changed since the last sync.
If nothing else, hopefully, this will help you understand what's driving my request...
- Deletes temporary files as they're transferred to the iPod instead of at the end of the overall transfer to avoid running out of disk space.
I just added this. Every 20 files that are transcoded will pause and send to the iPod and then remove the temp files to save space. You will have to wait to see it until the next build of MC (sorry).
I just got done testing this and it works great. I even tried to break it by canceling in the middle of transcoding and everything was on the iPod through the last transfer. Needless to say, I didn't have the guts to try and break it while it was actually doing the transfer.
The only suggestion that I have is to clean up after every five or ten songs that are transcoded. Watching my system last night, decoding and recoding averaged just over 60 megs per song. Multiply that by 20 and you have 1.2 gig of disk space that users have to keep available at all times. Unless there's a performance or coding issue, doing the cleanup more frequently would be better from a user perspective.
- Allows the user be able to normalize against the replay gain instead of/or as an alternative option to normalizing against the song peaks.
I will look at this next week.
As an FYI, the reason I was asking for this is to try and compensate for Apple disabling the sound leveling feature in the winiPods and having to fiddle with the volume all the time. I figured that if I'm going to be transcoding anyway, then it would be nice to have a feature that allows me to do sound leveling against the song's average volume (replay gain) or against the peaks (normalize).
- Allows the user to choose to do a "force convert" which will convert everything to the specified format (if it's not already in the format/bitrate), or a "safety convert" which will convert only non-mp3/wav/aiff/aa files to the specified format.
Currently, only files that are not the specified format or bitrate are converted (excluding normalization). In order to only convert files that are player specific (i.e. the list you have for iPod) I will need to modify all the handheld plugins to register this information because all handhelds use the converter and the list of approved file types is different from player to player. It can be done, but I am a little hesitant that it is worth it. Please weigh in on this and if you and others think it is important I will do it.
This was added at Kurt's request. As I remember it, Kurt was concerned about the transcoding time and wanted to be able to avoid transcoding unless it was required to get the original file to play on the iPod. The natural compromise was to make transcoding of "playable" files a selectable option. Kurt what are your thoughts?
By the way, what's up with the new MC icon? Is that one of the ways you're distinguishing it from MJ?
Thanks a million for your help Steve!
Cheers,
Kevin
Author
Topic: IPOD SUPPORT (Read 34189 times)