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[Ken Brookings]

I have about 20,000 songs in my main library.  I use this as the source library, holding any music file I have.  It includes several encoding formats but heavily weighted toward lossless formats like APE.

I have an iPOD that I use as my portable database; integrated into my car (very cool integration by the way; aftermarket integration of iPOD and Satellite Radio onto my Nav Screen showing all playlists and all other iPOD functions on the Nav screen.  Don't have to see or touch the Sat Radio or iPOD).  Of course, the portable database in the iPOD requires different songs,  database size, different playlists and, of course, different encoding format.

So I created a second library: "Portable Library".  I did so by cloning the source library, culling it to the right files, making the right playlists for the car, and then re-encoding the whole library to MP3; then porting all of this onto my iPOD.  All worked well.

My questions are from that point on; additons, maintenance, changes.

1.  What is the best way to add new music.  Sometimes I just rip a CD twice, once for each library; obviously not ideal.  Also I find I can copy from the source libary to a folder and scan that to move the music in to portable library but this creates a lot of complications.

Is there a "Move to xxx Library funtion?  Can anyone suggest a better process?

2.  Can playlists be copied or imported between Libraries?

3.  In the early days I encoded from my source library to the portable library into MP3-128.  Now I want to make those MP3-320 or VBR.  What is the best process for doing this  I really don't want to start over culling down a new portable library from my 20K source library.

Any advice is appreciated.

Media Center is the best!  I have recommended to may friends.  Keep up the good work.

Ken

[modelmaker]

3. The way this paragraph reads, you want to convert your 128 mp3s to 320 or vbr mp3s. If that's so, this would be a waste of time as you will end up lessor quality mp3s than even the 128mp3s. Use the ape files or the CDs to convert from.

[Ken Brookings]

nope, sorry I wasn't clear.  Two libraries: One called Source with all files in a lossless format.  Other libary called Portable which has a subset of the source files converted mostly to MP3 128. I want to replace the 2500 or 3000 MP3 128 files in the portable libary with files from converted to 320 from the source library lossless files.  Looking for good way to do this.

[hit_ny]

Are  the filenames identical between the ape & mp3 files, file extensions excepted ?

so track-1.ape has a counterpart track-1.mp3

How do you plan to keep the two libraries in sync, in the future ?

[Ken Brookings]

yes, file names are the same. 
I don't really want to keep the two libraries in sync since they have different purposes; portable library would always be a subset of source library and playlists would be different.  All new music goes into Souce library; some new music goes into portable library.

[hit_ny]

What about filepaths ?..between the two libraries.

(ignore the drive letter for the moment)

x:\artist\album\track-1.ape and y:\artist\album\track-1.ape

..the idea i have is more pertinent to your third query.

How to get a list of ape files to replace the 128k mp3 ?

- You can get a list of mp3s to be converted by using a smartlist in your portable library which selects only those of bitrate 128k or less. Save that as a m3u file (playlist file)

Now the important bit is that the filepaths are the same else it won't work.

Edit the playlist file in a text editor and replace .mp3 with .ape. and the same for the drive letter (if necessary).

- load up the edited playlist file (in your ape Library) and if all went well, you have a list of ape files that need to be converted to mp3. Now you know which files to transcode to mp3.

As to placing those mp3s in the right place..here's an idea

*Warning* i strongly recommend you do a few test files to see whether it works out.

If the mp3s are tagged, then you can use Rename Files form properties. If you use a directory naming scheme, derived from tags like album, artist etc it just might do the trick.

So in the rename files from properties dialog, you can setup a naming convention eg.

[Base DIrectory]/[album]/[Track# - Name]

and MC will create directories automatically and place them according to the rules you specify. I'm not very well versed in best practices for the Rename from Properties thing, so suggest you search the forum.

If you develop your own naming scheme, it will be easier in the future to do these operations in MC.