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[BartMan01]

The one killer feature that I would still like to see is the ability for MC to see both a lossless and lossy copy of the same file as one for tagging purposes.  I have my music stored as APE files, but need them as MP3 for my iPod or playback on other devices.  I've tried a couple of different 'work arounds' for this, but so far nothing really works that well.

[Matt]

We provide on-the-fly conversion in all the major areas of the program.

However, this is still an area we're considering.  Another alternative to your suggestion would be to tell MC to "keep 10 GB" (or whatever) of converted MP3 files around in a cache directory.  This directory could be checked first before doing an actual conversion.

[BartMan01]

Another alternative to your suggestion would be to tell MC to "keep 10 GB" (or whatever) of converted MP3 files around in a cache directory.  This directory could be checked first before doing an actual conversion.

How do you do this?  Just did a quick look around and didn't see this as an option, but that would solve my iPod sync time issue that using APE would cause.  Doesn't help with the XBox 360 through Media Connect - but I can just hook my iPod up to the XBox if I want to play the files.

[Matt]

Neither alternatives exist yet.  I was just brainstorming.

For now, on-the-fly conversion is your best bet.

[glynor]

Matt... Perhaps one way to do this would be to allow us to somehow cross reference files in a separate tag, and have MC then "join" them into one symbolic unit overall.  You could potentially still list each file as an individual discreet item, but have all the changes that affect one "member" of a cross-referenced group affect all of the files. This could be useful for more than just the MP3/losseless storage and managment (which I probably wouldn't use as high-quality lossy files are good enough for my walkman-damaged ears)...

If it was implemented slickly enough, you could use it to solve:

1. MP3/losseless duplicate management
2. Manage and Play Albums as a whole unit (mostly solved currently but that would be much more intuitive)
3. Manage and Play multi-part files (split up video files) or complex file types (such as M2V+PCM-WAV+AC3 files or InDesign-style compound documents) cleanly.

And I'm sure we'd find other wacky uses for it too.  Perhaps as MC's database becomes more relational and server friendly this type of feature could be implemented...

I should mention, I'm not by any means calling for it right now (if it's worth doing my mom always said).

[marko]

"if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well" ?
mine said that too!

Glynor, at the beginning of your post, above, I was recoiling, thinking, this is waaay too complex, I'm finding it hard to keep up"....

but by the end, you'd joined all the pieces perfectly for me, and you want to know where this idea would absolutely rock?
Images, photos. that's where!!
MC could save any image edits as a new file, linked to the original. It could (hopefully) keep track of multiple versions of an image. Each time it's edited, a new file is created. MC could keep the tags for each of these files synchronised, including the EXIF data.
You know, if acdSee or photoshop elements updates/creates an EXIF tag, they also create a tag that contains the software name, and when I see that, I think how good it would be to see MC in there. Maybe it's possible the advertising would pay the developement costs!!
It would certainly step MC up to a new level.

That is the first idea to really 'light my fire' in a long time.

Matt, I hope you'll stay active in this thread as I'd love to hear your comments regarding glynor's suggestion.
The terms "10 gig" and "cache" sound contradictory at first, then all the lights come on, I smile, and I see how cool it could be to have a 10 gig cache.
absolutely no offense meant, but I like glynor's idea better.
What do you think?

I'm of the opinion that a photograph's EXIF data is as essential to that photo as an mp3's standard id3 tags are to it. They're not 'just' metadata, they're a part of the picture, and so should be saved as such. I could use MC to manage my photos, and then send photos to my mum, who uses elements, and my brother, who uses acdsee, and they would be able to see the captions I'd added to them. How cool would that be!!

[ingram3480]

I tried the on-the-fly conversion and converted about 3000 tunes from my library of 9000.  I stopped at that point for two reasons:

1)  it simply takes too long - about 45secs a song - and during that time the iPOD had to be connected to MC and wasn't available for me to use.
2)  if I ever wanted (or had to) start over I again had to deal with the amount of time needed.  Why not just convert once and be done with it....

So, on a different PC I converted the APE's to MP3 but the "price" is now I have two libraries on the two separate PC's.  I am open to alternative methods if any one has suggestions but building this into MC seems to be the ultimate solution.   

I strongly vote for MC to seamlessly handle the loss-less and the lossy as a single meta file with two physical files.  I would want to play/listen to the APE format while downloading the MP3's to the iPOD.  The engineering details (cache...whatever) I will leave up to JRiver guru's.

(A added bonus would be the ability to handle multiple editions of a picture the same way as suggested by Marko - BTW Photoshop Elements already does this)

And, lastly, like others have mentioned MC 11.1.xxx just rocks.  The thumbnail performance and the iPOD support are fantastic!!!  What a great upgrade.

-- Larry

[tjobbins]

I tackled this same problem a while ago back in version 10.   90% of my music was in APE format, the other 10% in MP3.  I wanted to convert all the APEs to MP3s, and then be able to individually select "all mp3s" for the ipod and "original library" for PC listening.

I've since lost the details, so I am a bit rusty.  But basically I first converted all my tracks to MP3, and told it to copy the resulting files into a new directory and create an artist/album structure there.

I then imported all those MP3s.   

I then created a custom filter that included:
All APEs
All MP3s that did not have APE equivalents
.. and therefore none of the mp3 copies

I can't remember exactly how I did the second item - it was along the lines of: select all ape's and mp3s where track number, album name, song name are all identical, then filter to just show mp3s - then use that filter as an exclusion in another filter: find all mp3s that are not in that list.

Once I had this, I used this for the View Scheme and used this to play from the PC - it was basically the original library before any conversion took place.   When I exported to my ipod I used a filter which selected just MP3 files.

Finally, I had another filter which would identify which APEs did not have a MP3 copy yet - whenever I added new APEs to my library I would use this filter to identify which new tracks had been added, and make MP3 copies of them all.

Took a while to set up (tho by far the longest part was the initial MP3 conversion!), but worked smoothly once I had it.

I actually need to recreate this in the next few days as my girlfriend has just got an iPod and wants to be able to quickly transfer any of our library (which is still mostly APEs).   Let me know if you're interested in the exact steps, once I've figured it all out again.

[bspachman]

I've done this since I first purchased MC9.

I've set up a "Duplicate" field in the MC library. All the transcoded MP3s have this flag set.

However, it's still a hassle to do audio analysis, tag updates, etc. etc. on what amounts to 2 libraries....

I'm very interested in any progress that can be made in this area!

brad

[NickM]

I rip 100CD’s to APE at one time.  Once all the editing, spell checking, cover art and tagging is done, I write the library to the tags.  Then copy the entire APE directory to an MP3 directory and run a convert.

Yes, it means that I have two libraries, but switching between them is not difficult.  On an on-going basis I do sometimes make changes to the APE master library.  I set a flag for updates, copy these across manually to the MP3 directories, and convert as necessary.

One of the reasons for this methodology  is that MC just converts the file, it doesn’t replicate the directory structure with the cover art in each album directory.

So, yes, I would be 100% wholeheartedly in favour of this new option.

Ideally I would like a master APE library, and the option to set a flag whether the file should be duplicated into MP3 ( or some other format ).  This should be a low priority thread that won’t interrupt other things going on ( inside or outside MC ) and should run either continuously or on a timed basis.   And take the cover art with it…

nick

[BigAl]

I'm with the BartMan.  I have exactly the same scenario and would love MC to handle tagging of the same track in both APE/MP3.  This would save me soooo much time.

[salsbst1]

I currently do something like bspachman and tjobbins do, but it is hardly ideal.

I'd like to see MC keep hidden lossy copies of the lossless files after the first time it auto-converts them for me while sending to a handheld, and then have it keep the tags in those hidden lossy copies up to date for me (or delete it if for some reason I delete the original lossless file).

[jgreen]

I would like to see this feature, just so I can keep online duplicates of my lossless files, as a backup.  Restoring WAVs, for example, is a nightmare, but having pre-linked backup files would prevent this.  So don't limit it just to lossy conversions, allow 10gb or 500 gb for links to archival files as well.

[hit_ny]

We provide on-the-fly conversion in all the major areas of the program.

It appears to me that the simplest solution to what the original poster asked, is that during the conversion process all relevant tags are carried over from the APE file to the mp3.  AA stuff the lot.

Does this not happen currently ?

[bspachman]

I believe the tags are carried over (as long as MC is doing the conversion process).

The problem for me is that I convert to m4a (AAC) lossy files and until recently, MC didn't handle AAC files very intuitively. I had to create a workflow that involved the iTunes encoder and Foobar2k as the conversion engine.

I believe things may have simplified for me since I started using AAC in that MC now works much better with that filetype....

However, you still end up have multiple Library entries or multiple libraries to handle the various versions of the files.

Here's hoping for a more elegant solution...

brad

[hit_ny]

However, you still end up have multiple Library entries or multiple libraries to handle the various versions of the files.

Ack..forgot bout that, something like a typo and you have 2 different entries for what is essentially the same file.

Now this sounds like a syncing problem. Maybe some way to sync tag entries between the two.

How to specify the direction in this case ? 
ape -> mp3 or the other way round.

You might have to put both APEs & MP3s in the same library and rely on filters to pick between.

[ingram3480]

BUMP....

Maybe a 11.2 feature....or 12.x??

[PDP8User]

One possibility, instead of separately caching the MP3, is to embed it in the APE as a tag. APEv2 tags can be binary and large (32-bit size field). (It's a bit like storing a preview JPEG in a RAW image file.)

I'd suggest an option flag like the one you use for storing imagery in the tags.

The overhead in the size of the APE file wouldn't be enormous (depending on the Lame settings) & after all,  the MP3 has to be stored somewhere. This way if the file is moved around then both versions are moved together.

Of course, it means that you HAVE to use MC to sync the portable - you don't have a separate file to move using the OS commands or other tools.

[Jakester]

YES!  MC absolutely needs this.

I use secure ripping to .ape with ASIO playback for my hifi system.  But I want a synced .mp3 version of my library for iPod and other reasons.  When I change a tag it should change in both libraries for that same song.  One library is the "master" and other(s) are slaves in this respect.  Only the "master" needs to hold links to slaves.  And when a file is deleted in the master we should have the option to delete it from the slave library.

With the popularity of portable players this master/slave library idea is such an obvious need.  Please J River - drop all other efforts and get this to work!  What else could be deemed higher priority right now?

[asda]

Would it be possible to include a link to the other file (mp3, jpeg, ogg) inside the tags for ape files (or any file).

Not sure how these tags work but say
old version=  track=03: Name=I Can't Dance: artist=Genesis Album=....etc.. Genre=Rock
New version=  track=03: Name=I Can't Dance: artist=Genesis Album=....etc.. Genre=Rock Ext refs=Jpeg{cover Art}"m:\images\Genesis\We Can't Dance.jpeg", mp3{ipod}x:\file2368.mp3

This way high quality mp3 (like those you get from emusic) can also be re-encoded at 96Kbps for those ipod users.

More importantly in my opinion Cover art could be permanently attached to ape,mp3,(ogg files Hopefully) without increasing the filesizes (much).

[enigman]

Any update on this?  I brought this up about two years ago, without too much success
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=18852.msg130614#msg130614
but it's nice to see there's renewed interest in it.  I'd be happy with MC being able to keep track of two different versions of a song (kind of like a thumbnail vs a full sized image), but something even more flexible would be cool too:

Looking towards the future, what would be great would be if MC could support something like the Matroska spec.  This would allow for multiple types or versions of media to be stored in a single file - ie, storing a lossless and lossy version of an audio file (at one or multiple bitrates).  This is similar to what PDP8User suggested, but I think Matroska is much more flexible and would perform much better than adding an entire MP3 as metadata.  In addition, Matroska can support multiple media types, so  only the container would have to be implemented, and then it would work for whatever format you want (Flac vs APE, MP3 vs Ogg vs WMA), rather than trying to figure out how to embed as metadata into a bunch of other different formats.  Again, the point of using a container format would be that it wouldn't require a massive update to how the media database is handled (since its still only one physical file), and as one physical file it would be easier to keep track of files on the hard drive (one file per song, rather than 2 or more), tags would only have to be kept in one place, and you wouldn't have to worry about keeping everything in sync. 

The things that would need to updated for this kind of system would be: an encode plugin, to handle the new container format and the addition (or deletion) of different types of media to the file (with the actual encoding being handled by existing plugins), and a playback plugin, which would handle the extraction of the correct audio stream which could then be passed to an existing playback plugin. 
Keeping track of what formats are in the file could be handled by a new library tag (extracted by the playback plugin). 

The only thing that would need to be addressed in the overall MC framework, outside of what could be accomplished with a plugin, would be transcoding from this container format to another format.  If an MP3 exists in the container, you'd want that to be extracted rather than just passing the highest-quality format in the container to the MP3 encoder (as would probably happen now if someone were to implement something like this) - and likewise if the MP3 doesn't exist in the container, you'd probably want to make sure the converted file is not just extracted to wherever you want it (iPod etc), but also stored back into the container for future use.  This functionality would ideally need to be built into the existing format conversion part of Media Center, but then again, it could, in theory, be handled by the plugin (if someone is brave enough to try to implement this without JRiver's support), though that might make it of limited use for things like portable players where you'd ideally want to use the built-in controls for that, rather than having to rebuild all of that functionality in the container plugin.

So what do you say, J River, any interest in implementing Matroska in a future version?

[Mr ChriZ]

This would allow for multiple types or versions of media to be stored in a single file - ie, storing a lossless and lossy version of an audio file (at one or multiple bitrates). 

Now that I like the sound of 

[SterlingY]

This is the NUMBER ONE feature I could use, for all the reasons stated above. I maintain two machines to handle it now. It's cumbersome.

Implementing Matroska would be brilliant.

-Sterling

[BullishDad]

This would be a fantastic feature.  I maintain two libraries, one APE/WAV, the other MP3 for home use versus portable use.

It is a pain to make changes in two places, have to manually duplicate playlists, copy cover art and more.

If this could be a high priority new feature, I'm sure that many MC users will use it and be happy to advocate the program to others, just for this particular feature alone.

[slipknot]

We provide on-the-fly conversion in all the major areas of the program.

However, this is still an area we're considering.  Another alternative to your suggestion would be to tell MC to "keep 10 GB" (or whatever) of converted MP3 files around in a cache directory.  This directory could be checked first before doing an actual conversion.

The cache dir is a cool idea.  On the fly is great, but takes lots of time.

[Chili-Jam]

Hi, this is my number one requested feature too.

I'm about to rip my cds to lossless which i did already for MP3 (13k Songs).
Now i want to simply transfer my ratings. I know this can be done already
but trouble will start afterwards.

My usecase: I'm travelling a lot and i always keep a usb-disc with me that holds all
my MP3s and my MC library. This way i will keep tagging my MP3s while on the road.
Now when back at home i want to be able to transfer these new ratings to my lossless
files (library). At home i will only listen to lossless and will keep editing the lossless files now
which i need to synch to the MP3s before going on the road again.

Right now i think this might be a nightmare to do.
Any solution in MC will be appreciated.

[Jakester]

just a bump ... would be great to hear from J River again on this! ...

[kiwi]

Just got pointed at this thread from another. 

I really like the idea of having the MP3 (or other file(s)) being in the "tag" of the APE file.  This would make life easier and having just one file to manage would be awesome!!!

-kiwi

[slipknot]

We provide on-the-fly conversion in all the major areas of the program.

However, this is still an area we're considering.  Another alternative to your suggestion would be to tell MC to "keep 10 GB" (or whatever) of converted MP3 files around in a cache directory.  This directory could be checked first before doing an actual conversion.

I like the cache idea - LOTS

[BartMan01]

Hi, this is my number one requested feature too.

I'm about to rip my cds to lossless which i did already for MP3 (13k Songs).
Now i want to simply transfer my ratings. I know this can be done already
but trouble will start afterwards.

My usecase: I'm travelling a lot and i always keep a usb-disc with me that holds all
my MP3s and my MC library. This way i will keep tagging my MP3s while on the road.
Now when back at home i want to be able to transfer these new ratings to my lossless
files (library). At home i will only listen to lossless and will keep editing the lossless files now
which i need to synch to the MP3s before going on the road again.

Right now i think this might be a nightmare to do.
Any solution in MC will be appreciated.

Actually this is fairly easy to do.

Build your APE library on your main PC.
Set the external drive up as a device in MC and sync the files to that as MP3's.
When you re-connect the device, MC will update your ratings and play stats in your main library.

Basically, it will see the drive as an MP3 player.  This is what I am currently doing with my iPod to get around the multiple file issue.  The big drawback to this is that it takes time to convert a large library, and the sync process does not see some changes (like album art changes) - so a full wipe/re-sync is needed from time to time on the removable device.  With this method you can't just wipe/re-load the removable device as needed, you have to do it when you have time to let the system re-convert all o fthe files again.

[zurn]

Actually this is fairly easy to do.

Build your APE library on your main PC.
Set the external drive up as a device in MC and sync the files to that as MP3's.
When you re-connect the device, MC will update your ratings and play stats in your main library.

This is an answer i've been looking for, but want to ask about my situation.  I think it's a little simpler.

My home PC is my main library, and i can connect to it via Library Server from work and that's great.  I'm just thinking i'd rather not leave the PC on all day just for that.   I don't really require any conversion, i'm just obsessive about playstats and would like to be able to add new files from either location.

From reading this, i'm gathering that i could do this:
-Get a usb drive and sync'd my main library to it (w/o conversion), then took it to work for a few weeks, listen to tunes and dl stuff at work and add it to that library
-Then, occasionally i could take the drive home, reconnect and sync.  This would update the playstats on the main library from the usb drive, and would also add files that i had downloaded to it to the main library and vice versa?

If this is so, my question is:  at the work location, do i just start a new library when i first connect the sync'd device? 

Thanks for confirming any/all of this!!