Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[mikebarnes]

I've used MC11 to load my library, which contains compilation albums, into my 60 Gb iPod (5th generation I think). I want to get the iPod to list the compilations under the "Compilations" menu, rather than listing artists individually under "Artists". That works fine with iTunes but I want to use MC instead.

I've read thread http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=38171.0 which talks about the itunescompilation tag. That's what I'm trying to use.

In MC I created a tag "iTunesCompilation" and checked "Store in file tags (when possible)". I set this tag to 1 for all compilation album tracks. I deleted the tracks from the iPod and reloaded them using MC. I have MC set to convert them from WMA to MP3 when going to the iPod. After reloading the tracks onto the iPod using MC I checked the iTunesCompilation flag in the iPod section of MC and it was set for the compilation tracks and unset for other tracks. Perfect.

However when I eject the iPod, the itunescompilation flag seems to have had no effect. The iPod's Compilations menu is empty and artists are listed individually under the Artists menu.

And when I reattach the iPod to MC and examine the tracks concerned, expecting the iTunesCompilation flag to be set like it was before I ejected, I find that it's now unset.

What am I doing wrong?

[mikebarnes]

[Following up my own posting]

So, ten days later, no replies...

I've been doing some more work on this. I discovered in the list of changes to MC12 "12.0.116 (11/17/06) ... 5. NEW: Added support for compilations on iPods". So me using MC11 could obviously be part of the problem. I upgraded to MC12 and tried everything again.

To sum up the results:

• The iTunesCompilation tag has no effect on the iPod
• The MixAlbum tag causes an album to appear under "Compilations" on the iPod (good), but still leaves the individual artists under "Artists" on the iPod (wrong)
• The MixAlbum tag doesn't do anything at all if I use a conversion cache

So, unless I've missed something, there are two problems with MixAlbum: it only does half the job in the iPod, and it doesn't work if caching is enabled.

Can anyone confirm these problems and/or suggest a work-around? Otherwise, I'll just have to stick with iTunes, which I'd really rather not do.

[JimH]

Did you try MC13?  It has a lot of changes for iPods.

Apple keeps moving the peas around.

[Frobozz]

The compilation feature does work when syncing an iPod.  It is working on my iPod and I use MC12 to sync.

I suspect that maybe your directory structure and file organization isn't right for MC.  MC is a bit picky about directory structure in determining which albums are proper "Multiple Artists" albums.  There is a FAQ or Wiki page or help page that describes the rules that MC uses to determine what is a "Multiple Artists" album, but I'm unable to locate it right now.  Anyone know the page?  Maybe it was a forum post?

Anyways, MC needs each multiple artist CD to be in its own directory.  So you need a directory structure something like:

D:\My Music\Pink Floyd\The Wall (Disc 1)
D:\My Music\Pink Floyd\The Wall (Disc 2)
D:\My Music\(Multiple Artists)\Party Time Fifties

Once everything is in one directory MC should identify "Multiple Artists" albums as such and group each multiple artists CD together.  Check the "Album Artist (auto)" tag in MC and see if each multiple artists CD is properly identified as a "(Multiple Artists)" album.  Once that is working you should be able to sync your iPod and MC will properly organize the iPod so that the iPods compilation feature works.

[mikebarnes]

The compilation feature does work when syncing an iPod.  It is working on my iPod and I use MC12 to sync.

I suspect that maybe your directory structure and file organization isn't right for MC. [...]

Thanks, that's just what I need to know - that it's worth persisting. Just to make things absolutely clear, do the individual artists from collections show up in the "Artists" menu on your iPod? They do here (with MC12, but not with iTunes) and getting rid of them is what I'm focussing on at the moment.

My directory structure looks similar to yours:

M:\Jukebox Music\Popular\Pink Floyd\The Wall                             (both CDs in one directory, track numbers 1-26)
M:\Jukebox Music\Popular\Various Artists\Eighties Legends

Also I look at MC's "Mix Album" tag and it is 1 for my compilations and blank otherwise, so it seems that MC is happy with my directory structure.

The "Album Artist (auto)" column for compilations contains "Various Artists" because that's my preferred name and I put it that in the "Album Artist" tag.

I've just emptied my iPod and reloaded everything, and all the compilation artists are still showing up in the "Artists" main menu item. What I want to see is the (345) album artists not the (966) track artists.

I guess the model of iPod might make a difference. Mine's a 60GB "iPod Video" (5th generation, I think).

[mikebarnes]

Did you try MC13?  It has a lot of changes for iPods.

That will be my next step, but upgrading to MC12 was fairly traumatic so I'm taking a breather. :-)

[Frobozz]

Just to make things absolutely clear, do the individual artists from collections show up in the "Artists" menu on your iPod? They do here (with MC12, but not with iTunes) and getting rid of them is what I'm focussing on at the moment.

Here is what my iPod does for compilations artists:
If an artist only exists on a compilation album then that artists does not show up in the artists menu on the iPod.
If an artists exists in both a compilation album and a regular full artist album then that artist shows up in the artists menu, and if I click through that artist I see both the full artist albums by that artist and compilation album but only the songs by that artist.

I'm using an iPod Classic 80GB.  I'm using the latest build of MC12.

The "Album Artist (auto)" column for compilations contains "Various Artists" because that's my preferred name and I put it that in the "Album Artist" tag.

That may be what is confusing MC.  Try deleting the "Various Artists" and let MC do its default "(Multiple Artists)" for the "Album Artist (auto)" tag.

[mikebarnes]

Try deleting the "Various Artists" and let MC do its default "(Multiple Artists)" for the "Album Artist (auto)" tag.

Good suggestion. I tried that, but it didn't make any difference. (To be safe I always initialize the iPod using MC and then transfer all the tracks again.)

[Frobozz]

I'm at a loss.  Unless maybe one of the iTunes created tags is messing things up??
I have never let iTunes touch my library.  I have no iTunes generated tags.  The only thing I have let iTunes do is update the firmware.

You can try taking a compilation album and cleaning out all tags.  Then retag the album using Media Center.  Then see if it gets properly identified as a compilation when you sync it to the iPod.

Whatever you find out, it could possibly be considered a bug since it's causing such difficulty.  Figure out what it is and hopefully it will be something that is fixed in MC13.

[mikebarnes]

I'm at a loss.  Unless maybe one of the iTunes created tags is messing things up??
I have never let iTunes touch my library.  I have no iTunes generated tags.  The only thing I have let iTunes do is update the firmware.

Interesting idea but I don't let iTunes touch my library either. My files are WMA and when I add them to my iTunes library, iTunes converts them to a format that it can understand, creating an entirely new directory structure. So in addition to the directories for MC that I listed earlier, containing WMA files, there are further directories for iTunes containing m4a files:
 
M:\iTunes Music\Popular\Pink Floyd\The Wall
M:\iTunes Music\Popular\Various Artists\Eighties Legends

iTunes obviously influences the tags in the m4a files in "iTunes Music", but not the tags in the wma files in "Jukebox Music" that MC is looking at.

And I clean out the iPod before every test. So I don't think iTunes has any influence on what I'm seeing.

Whatever you find out, it could possibly be considered a bug since it's causing such difficulty.  Figure out what it is and hopefully it will be something that is fixed in MC13.

Yes, I'm beginning to realise that that's the only avenue left open to me.

[Frobozz]

I wonder if the process of converting from WMA is what is causing the problem?  MC likely has a different code path when converting during a sync than for a normal sync.

At this point I'd give MC13 a try just to see if the new version fixes that.  There have been changes in MC13 in how it syncs and how it handles transcoding during a sync.  I don't know the details but I have seen lots of mentions of those sorts of changes in the change logs.

I'd also do a sanity check and create a compilation album in MP3 format and try syncing that album to the iPod.  That will avoid the WMA to MP3 transcoding step.  I do know that MP3 compilation albums do work with MC12 and an iPod Classic (80GB) because it is working for me.  All my music is in MP3 format.  I'm not doing any transcoding during a sync.

[mikebarnes]

I've been working long and hard on this problem and have lots of information to report. Before that, though, thanks to everyone who's contributed to this thread. I'd have given up long ago if it wasn't for you guys.

OK, confession time. I've discovered that part of the original problem (mixed album artists showing up in the iPod's Artists menu) was actually down to a setting in the iPod itself. Explanation: one of the things I did when attempting to resolve the problem was to reinitialise the iPod using iTunes. That reset all my iPod settings to the factory default. So I checked/changed the Compilations setting in the iPod before continuing. What I didn't realise is that there are actually two Compilations settings in the iPod and I'd only changed one of them. When I discovered this after my last posting and changed the other setting, things started working a whole lot better.

But that's only part of the solution. To cut a long story short, I've found that:

• MC13 crashes and freezes too often to be of any use to me in its current form
• MC11 is no longer any use to me either. One of the things I did when checking things out was to upgrade the firmware in my iPod, and it now no longer recognises any database created by MC11.
• That leaves me with MC12. Not a problem because MC12 seems to do quite a lot of things better than MC11 did.
• MC12 seems to get the "Mix Album" tag right and uses it to flag compilations in the iPod. But it doesn't work if I specify a conversion cache. I really want a conversion cache because converting all my music from WMA to MP3 takes many days of non-stop computing power.
• I tried creating my own cache by defining a new hard disk folder (N:\MP3s) as a Handheld and syncing to that. However the Mix Album tag doesn't seem to work on a Handheld (it only works in a Library) so when I sync from that device to the iPod, compilation albums don't appear in the menus as they should.
• So the only way forward as far as I can see is to create an MC12 Library from the folder that I defined as a Handheld, and load the iPod from that. I've tested the concept and it seems to work. Testing it completely will take the rest of the week at least.

So to sum up:
 I create a hard disk folder "N:\MP3s"
 I define a Handheld device called "MP3s" located in that folder
 I sync from my "Jukebox" library to the "MP3s" device, converting from WMA to MP3
 I create a new library "MP3s" and add the contents of the "N:\MP3s" folder to it
 I sync from the MP3s library to my iPod

That all sounds quite complicated but to be honest it's hardly any different from what I've been doing with iTunes for several years now. I'll know within the next week or so whether it all really works and whether it's any better than using iTunes.

While I've been typing this MC12 has been preparing to convert my libary from WMA to MP3 and sync to "N:\MP3s". It's just got started and it says 311.9 hours remaining, so I hope it all works. :-)

Thanks again everyone.

[JimH]

If you can get a log when it crashes, please send it, with a link to this thread to matt at jriver c om

[mikebarnes]

If you can get a log when it crashes, please send it, with a link to this thread to matt at jriver c om

As I said I've stopped testing MC13 but if there's likely to be a log file from a previous crash that I could send you, let me know where it is.

MC13 also froze on me several times, in similar circumstances. I was syncing an iPod or disk folder, and everything stopped when one of the files got to "Converting: 100%" and before "Uploading". I'm using the LAME encoder.

[mikebarnes]

While I've been typing this MC12 has been preparing to convert my libary from WMA to MP3 and sync to "N:\MP3s". It's just got started and it says 311.9 hours remaining, so I hope it all works. :-)

Incidentally the progress box is showing speeds around 50 MB/sec. That's impossible over a 100 Mb/s LAN cable. A quick calculation shows that it should be saying 50 Mb/sec. :-)

The good news is now that it's settled down I've apparently only got 114 hours to wait.

[Matt]

The transfer speed is a floating average of the actual megabytes (MB) per second for the physical file transfer.

If the OS is caching or the file is not really transferring (but saying it is), it's possible you might see higher numbers than you expect.

[mikebarnes]

The transfer speed is a floating average of the actual megabytes (MB) per second for the physical file transfer.

If the OS is caching or the file is not really transferring (but saying it is), it's possible you might see higher numbers than you expect.

Whichever way you look at it, there's something bad happening. The process has been running for several days now and I've never seen a reported speed of less than 30 MB/sec (50 MB/sec is typical). The source files are on another PC and the link has an absolute maximum capacity of 12.5 MB/sec. MC has converted 66% of 287 GB in about 80 hours and my arithmetic makes that 0.65 MB/sec. If I add the size of the output files the figure creeps up to 0.78 MB/sec.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that MC with its 50 MB/sec is providing a seriously optimistic figure, either miscalculating or counting the same data many times.

Of course I might have made a mistake but you're welcome to check my calculations. And it goes without saying that the speed is what it is, and lowering the figure that MC reports isn't going to make things happen any quicker!

[mikebarnes]

Just a quick note to say that everything now seems to be working OK. Thanks for all the help.

Problems, there have been a few:

• When syncing using the LAME encoder, MC12 sometimes reports "Error", sometimes hangs, for no apparent reason (about 0.1% of conversions). Resyncing always fixes the problem.
• The artist list in my iPod is sorted weirdly. iTunes sorts A-Z, 0-9. MC12 sorts 9-0, A-Z. Bizarre.
• I haven't been able to make any sense of the "Delete from handheld any files not in sync list" and "Resync if date modified has changed" options. I know what I think they ought to do but in practice they never seem to do what I'm expecting. When I get time I'll create a small test library to see if I can make sense of them.