Upgraded my iPod

[andrewmel]

My first dap was the H320. As it's battery started to die, and I was having to delete albums to put new ones on, I needed to upgrade.

Given the paucity of good high capacity daps, and the then recent addition of Rockbox to the iPods I upgraded to a 5G 60Gb iPod. It was beautiful and slim, and with three times the capacity, and less hiss when using my Shures than my H320, I was well pleased.

But with library creep I was again in the same situation again, dying battery and capacity desires higher than I had. Further, I am soon off on holiday in southeast Asia for a month or three (depending on the next job) and will be wanting better battery life than Rockbox currently supplies.

This morning I strolled off to Costco and bought a 160Gb iPod classic. I installed iTunes on my computer for the first time, pointed it to my music and waited. A little later I pointed iTunes to my iPod and sync'd it. When I got home from work and a couple of brews I started adding album art. I used the iTunes store for that at first but that didnt find it all, so I have been pointing iTunes at the covers I have and adding a couple more.

I have not finished this process, but it is time for bed, and I have re-sync'd it, and am about to play it for the first time.

I will miss Rockbox, but have hopes that it may yet make it to the Classics...

The new Classic is beautiful, with its rounded edges.

a

[musichound]

Andrew, please let us know how the audio compares with the 5G. From what I read, it is supposed to sound a bit crisper, but with a bit less midrange than the 5G. Of course, audio is subjective so your audio experience will vary.

[BBD]

Welcome to the "He-Man My Classic Works Fine Nanny-Nanny-Boo-Boo" Club, a!

[saints]

i-tunes, hehehehehehehe
Ahh its not so bad, once you done, it took a few weeks for me to sort only 25gb music with the blacked out album art, double listings etc

But overall the classic is a device that I dont think about replacing as its battery life and sound is very acceptable

[andrewmel]

Not done yet.

A fair bit of the album art was not found, and all the compilation albums were not joined up. I have most of the album art as cover.jpg files in the directories, so it is just a matter of pointing.

No double listings so far, though there was one song with the album title incorrectly named....

a

[andrewmel]

I now have all my album art sorted and my music is in good shape.

I have 80Gb of lectures as well. They are taking lots more time, as they are very poorly tagged in most cases. At present I am adding all the lecture series as music but may look at what it takes to make them something else. I have tagged all the artist and album names with a leading zz to keep them together, but this does put them in front of the 20 or so compilation albums I have.

I am liking iTunes. It makes simple tagging easy and I like the podcast management. The coverflow works very well on the iPod and in iTunes.

So far I have had no problems with the iPod. There are a couple of things I would change, but overall two thumbs up. Much better than I expected.

a

[saints]

Originally Posted by andrewmel

There are a couple of things I would change, but overall two thumbs up. Much better than I expected.

a

Enlighten us!
Id like a proper OFF message, thats about it

[andrewmel]

1) With the volume right down there is still a fair bit of sound coming out of my Shures.

2) Black background please. It would look a lot better than the white with my black iPod.

3) The ability to select more info on the now playing screen. Bitrate, etc.

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[andrewmel]

I am now able to do most things with iTunes, and it is pretty good.

I have a lot of lecture series, and listen to them on and off. Sometimes I forget which I am up to in a series. But those smart playlists are pretty good. First I set all tracks in the series to remember where I finished listening. This is handy as some go for an hour and have two lectures in one track. Next I make a list that selects only the lecture series I am listening to. But the trick is to also make that playlist exclude any tracks that have a playcount greater than zero.

Now to listen to wherever I am up to I just need to go to the playlist and select the first track. If it is new for me it will go to the beginning. Otherwise it will go to wherever I left off. If I dont listen to the last few seconds of a lecture and start that one again, it goes straight to the end, plays those last few seconds, and moves to the next track. Very clever.

Two criticisms of iTunes.

It is laggy. Sometimes this pisses me off, but it is looking at over 10,000 tracks, with album art so not a small task.

I wish there were a way to it sort albums by date when you have the main sort as artist. Abbey Road should not be the first Beatles album in the list of Beatles albums.

a

[Danfried]

Well, I guess at this point you probably wouldn't want to bother using Mediamonkey with your iPod...

It's good you've figured out how to do things with the iPod firmware, because the odds of Rockbox coming out for the Classic now are looking mighty slim.

[andrewmel]

I agree, it does look like it might be a while before it happens, if at all.

But the smart playlists are a very nifty way of dealing with things. Just wish there was an easy way around that album sorting problem that didnt involve naming all albums with

(year) album name

which would stuff up ordering them by album. It works well in a filetree....

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[Danfried]

Originally Posted by andrewmel

I agree, it does look like it might be a while before it happens, if at all.

But the smart playlists are a very nifty way of dealing with things. Just wish there was an easy way around that album sorting problem that didnt involve naming all albums with

(year) album name

which would stuff up ordering them by album. It works well in a filetree....

a

I'm too lazy to find a link for the appropriate Rockbox thread, but nobody is even working on cracking the encryption. Nobody's cracked the encryption on the 2nd gen Nano, for that matter. A real pity. I think the constant release of new iPods -- along with the tendency of a lot of people to upgrade to newer iPods -- may provide a disincentive to work on Rockbox ports for the iPod line. By the time a port for a particular model is working really well, the number of potential users will have plummeted. Of course, you could always get lucky -- a handful of programmers who want to keep using their old iPods decide to go to the trouble of making a port mainly for their own use.

Anyway, I'm surprised that you say iTunes can't do what you want. You can certainly use multiple sort properties for a single playlist in Mediamonkey. For example, you could create a playlist of all Beatles tracks, and then have the tracks sorted by year, and then, within each year, by album, which I think would give the result you want.

I'm using the latest release candidate of Mediamonkey 3 with my H340, but it also supports iPod.

[andrewmel]

I could do that but if I go into the Music, Artist menus the albums are sorted alphabetically. Reading on the iPod forum it seems I am not the only member with this problem.

a

[Danfried]

Originally Posted by andrewmel

I could do that but if I go into the Music, Artist menus the albums are sorted alphabetically. Reading on the iPod forum it seems I am not the only member with this problem.

a

In that case, perhaps you might want to consider switching to Mediamonkey. You should be able to preserve your iTunes installation and all your data. For me, the great advantage is that it works with my H340 and Rockbox, and I can keep the same file tree structure on both my H340 and my computer. Of course, you will have a bit of a learning curve with the some of the features that iTunes doesn't have, but I love the program.

MediaMonkey Features (Manage, Play, Tag, Rename, Playlists)

EDIT: Agh, shoot. Just looking at the Mediamonkey forums, you might want to hold off for a while. The latest release candidate still has some issues with album art and the Classic.

[andrewmel]

For me the most useful feature is the smart playlists. I could live with the album order issue on my pc, but on the iPod it just sucks.

h

[musichound]

Originally Posted by andrewmel

For me the most useful feature is the smart playlists. I could live with the album order issue on my pc, but on the iPod it just sucks.

h

In iTunes try clicking the fourth field until Artist By Year is displayed. This should work as long as all your tags include the year of the release.

[andrewmel]

Thank you!!! Now that works on iTunes. Can it be done on my iPod?

a

[musichound]

Not sure. Hopefully being it's sorted that way on iTunes it will sync the same way on your player.

[andrewmel]

Unfortunately when I go back to sorting by artist, it is back to the same old evil sort by name thing....

Ahh well, nothing is perfect.

a

[musichound]

I'll see what I can figure out.

In the mean time there might be some information about this at iLounge.

[andrewmel]

The consensus there seems to be that this currently can't be fixed.

a