Fine. I hereby permanently and irrevokably declare that:

The COPY_TO_PORTABLE metadata item shall have only one of the following values - 0 (zero) indicating that a file must not be copied to portable music device, or 1 (one) to indicate that is allowed to be transferred. No other value is permitted, and the absence of COPY_TO_PORTABLE must be interpreted as a 1 value.

foo_pod is not in strict compliance with this standard, but it may be updated in the future, as time permits.

aero, I still love foo_pod, ignore this man who can't decide to make 2 playlists, one for his ipod songs and one for everything else. You're awesome, no matter how much he insults the awesomeness, it can't really make it less awesome. Yes it may sound like I'm sucking up, but really, I'm not. people who use completely proprietary things but aren't willing to do anything for themselves are foolish and selfish. I deal with the selfish all too often and the foolish, I can't say much more about :X

I don't own an iPod. I just want to support this plugin in a public FCS to make foobar more useful for everyone.

Which "completely proprietary" thing? Foobar is mostly open-source except the core. I guess spending over 3000 hours on a public FCS which contains mostly features for others means that "i'm not willing to do anything myself and am selfish", right?



Yeah, same here...

Just thought I may as well voice my desire for ratings support here (yeah I know it's been asked to death, but humor me), specifically ratings I set on the ipod being uploadable to Foobar (in my case I'd like it to write to the foobar db as well as update mp3 metadata at 'sync' time, but either would do).

You mentioned this being rather complex because of the file-matching issues ... might there be a way for you to generate and store some unique ID in the metadata of each track you send to the 'pod, and simultaneously record that ID in the Foobar db for the track in question? Then you could easily and reliably match things up on resync.

Recording the ID in the actual mp3's metadata might be even more useful, as you could then sync multiple iPods with multiple machines, and always have a means to know "which track is which" regardless of where you sync to/from. Come to think of it, having a mandatory GUID as part of the original ID3 specification sure would have made a lot of sense...

I use on-ipod rating primarily for one thing - marking songs I don't want on there anymore (I set them to 1 star). I get sick of having the same crappy/corrupted tracks turn up repeatedly in shuffle mode, and 1-starring them is the perfect solution. The way I do it now is that I try and remember which tracks are screwed up and manually remove them before the next sync. Obviously an error-prone method

</beg>

Thanks for foo_pod, don't mean to be annoying! This is the only thing I want in foo_pod, then I can kiss iTunes goodbye forever

Joel

Hi Aero, I have another request,

I know i can manually copy tracks to the ipod in an ordered folder style using windows explorer, and that you made an option to "Rebuild iTunesDB Database on iPod", but as you know by now, i use foo_pod's sync feature.
Can't you make an option to let foo_pod upload files into user-defined folders? In other words, let the user write a string in the foo_pod config panel, which foo_pod will use to create a folder style

some examples:

$if2(%album artist%,%artist%)\%album%\%tracknumber% - %title% would give K:\iPod_Control\Music\Artist\Album\Track - Title.ext

%genre%\$if2(%album artist%,%artist%) - %album%\%tracknumber% - %title% would give K:\iPod_Control\Music\Genre\Artist - Album\Track - Title.ext

I would really appreciate it if you managed to get this to work, cause the majority of my friends don't have foobar so atm i can't bring my ipod to play some files at their place. F00 to F99 doesn't work that easily

ps: your previous addition, which lets foo_pod skip unwanted tracks works like a charm, thanks

Sorry - no more feature requests from you, seeing as how your last one turned out...


You should just copy your Foobar2000 directory from your computer onto your iPod. Then you can run it directly off of the iPod (no installation necessary), and use all of the various Foobar & Foobar component features to play back the songs. It seems like that would be at least as useful as having the user-defined folders.

As for supporting non-Fnn directories - yeah, I could add this, although there are a couple reasons not to. First of all, newer iPods (iPod Photo, and maybe the Shuffle) have strict filename length restrictions, which might include the directory portion as well. So if you have iPod_Control\Music\Genre\Big Long Artist Name - Big Long Album Name, it might not be able to be played on the iPod.

Another problem is, despite my best intentions, foo_pod has to mange some filenames in order to have them fit within the aforementioned length restrictions. Especially if your songs are named "Artist - Album - Song Name", you might end up with directories of files that look like Artist - Album - Song NamA.mp3, Artist - Album - Song NamB.mp3, etc. Also, transcoded filenames are stored as a series of non-human friendly letters and numbers.

So I think you would be better off putting Foobar + foo_pod on your iPod, and use that to playback/copy songs from your iPod.

The GUID idea is very good, and would help with part of the problem. But the other piece just as difficult - so say we have a common identifier that links a file on your computer to a file on your iPod (BTW, this is essentially how foo_pod handles transcoded songs now). You then connect your iPod and 'sync'. The problem is that Foobar doesn't really have a media library like iTunes, so if a song isn't in an active playlist, there is no way for foo_pod to find it to update its rating/play count.

Maybe the Foobar database can help a little here...I really don't know enough about it to say for sure. I also would like to get ratings synchronized, so sooner or later, I'll really sit down and try to tackle this problem.

.zolder,

I wrote this little program about a year ago for the specific purpose of making it easy for me to copy files back off the iPod and into nice named directory structures. Might help, if you don't want to put a whole copy of foobar on the iPod: http://otto.homedns.org:8888/iTunes/iPodCopy.zip

It's a little standalone exe, should work on any 2000 or XP box. So I keep a copy on the iPod itself. Should work with any program that puts files on the iPod, I think.

Read the readme. It's fairly easy to use, but not wholly intuitive. However, here's a quick example string to try. "C:\my copied music directory\%3\%2\%5 - %1.%e". That'll copy files from the iPod on the c:\ drive using the artist\album\track - title.ext format you mentioned.

Foobar w/foo_pod can of course do the same thing, but this is a very small and fast single purpose program that might be more convienent sometimes.

Okay Aero, I understand the problem, too bad.
Otto, i've tried your program, but everytime i type my iPod drive letter and start scanning, i get kicked out of the program at 1493 files. I assume it is a broken mp3, but i have no way of knowing which one it is :/ thanks anyway

I'll install foobar on my iPod, didnt think of that before dead-easy

I have a problem with 0.99b version.

When I transcode a file the tags on the new file can't be written

Here is the log



Thanks for the great plugin, hope you can fix the problem.

Hey Aero,

I am using the latest version of foo_pod with a 2 Gen. iPod and for some reason, when I add a certain album (Beach Boys - Pet Sounds ) and I try to play it on the iPod, it just skips over all the songs and doesn't play them. I've added other songs and they work and I've tried removing then re-adding Pet Sounds, but it still doesn't work.

Any advice?

Thanks,
-Tristan

The iPod can be picky about tags sometimes. If it can't understand the tag, it'll skip the file. Try removing the tags and adding them back to the file. Kind of a PITA, but it often works.

This is a bug I introduced in 0.9.9b, caused by foo_pod writing a temporary file without a file extension. This confused Foobar and prevented it from writing the metadata. The effect is that while the song would be transcoded properly, it will not have any metadata.

I fixed this bug and will be posting 0.9.9c shortly. Thanks for your bug report!

Is this right? I have never known the iPod itself to be sensitive to tags, although I can see this happening if there are some weird ID3v2 tags (located at the beginning of the file) that cause the iPod's MP3 decoder to error out.

If removing the tags doesn't work, try transcoding the song and see if that helps. Maybe the original encoder is weird and the iPod refuses to play song created by it?

Version 0.9.9c is now available

This version simply fixes the transcoder/missing metadata problem reported by pnjman...

Thanks for the quick update, it works great now.

Hi

Been using foo_ipod and its great! ... however a quick question with playlists.

I have one foobar playlist with a number of albums in this playlist.

What I would like to do is select all the songs from one album (inside this foobar playlist) and copy to ipod (which i can do now), however when finish copying it asks me if I want to cerate a playlists based on those songs I have copied. The options would be

a) create playlists based on album / artist. Which means if i copied 5 albums of music from 3 artists - it would create either 1 playlist for each artist containing all songs from the ablums - it asks you

B) playlists from each album for all artists

C)or in the case where I have selected many songs from many artists just to create a named playlist - "funky music" or something.

Also anyway to delete a playlist or songs from an ipod ? Maybe when you have a foobar playlist you have an option which says delete this playlist from the ipod ?

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks

I first tried removing and replacing tags, but that didn't work, so then I tried transcoding and it works now. Thanks!

-Tristan

Just a quick question...

Why does it take so long to do a sync? Once I've got my iPod loaded, and I want to add a couple of albums by doing a sync all playlists, it takes ages for foo_pod to begin copying the files. Is it verifying the database during this time? Is that absolutely necessary?

Thanks!


What you want to do is create a new Foobar playlist tab, name it, then copy whatever songs you want in it. Then select Send Current Playlist To iPod - this will copy any files necessary (duplicates on the iPod are automatically ignored) and create an iPod playlist with the same name and contents. If you want some automation (like your examples above), the Extended Playlist Generator component will help you create the Foobar playlists, which you then send to the iPod using foo_pod.



Sure. Deleting playlists can be done from the foo_pod Playlist Editor. Just select the playlist you want to delete, click the Remove Playlist button, then the Apply button to actually remove the playlist on the iPod (you can click Cancel and undo all of your changes made in the Playlist Editor as well).

To delete songs from the iPod, first load the iPod songs into Foobar using the "Load iPod Songs To Foobar2000 Playlist" menu item. Then select one or more songs, right click, and select Delete Songs From iPod.

If you are just copying some new albums, use the Send options rather than Sync. Send is much faster, since it doesn't need to do the matching and comparing to see what needs to be deleted and what needs to be copied.

Hi

>What you want to do is create a new Foobar playlist tab, name it, then copy >whatever songs you want in it. Then select Send Current Playlist To iPod - this will >copy any files necessary (duplicates on the iPod are automatically ignored) and >create an iPod playlist with the same name and contents. If you want some >automation (like your examples above), the Extended Playlist Generator component >will help you create the Foobar playlists, which you then send to the iPod using >foo_pod.

The problem with this method is that I end up with about 100 foobar playlists which is not really workable. Foobat is fine with a few playlists, but on the ipod I tend to have a playlist for each artist or album. The main reason behind this is that although I am working on it - not all songs are perfectly tagged - so listening from my ipod using browse artist / album does not work too good - so playlists mean i can create a list of all artists and albums.

>To delete songs from the iPod, first load the iPod songs into Foobar using the "Load >iPod Songs To Foobar2000 Playlist" menu item. Then select one or more songs, >right click, and select Delete Songs From iPod.

Yeh got you, however save issue as above - end up with hundreds of playlists in foobar :-(

But 100 playlists on the iPod is workable?

You don't have to have all 100 playlists open in Foobar at the same time, but I kind of know what you are getting at. You would probably like a way to open a single iPod playlist as a Foobar tab, like from the Playlist Editor. I'll definitely consider adding that feature.

But the bottom line is that at some point, you're just going to have to bite the bullet and get your metadata up to snuff (at least Artist/Album/Title). I know I suffered when I first got my iPod, but with some good utilities, like ID3-Tag It and Foobar's own MassTagger, a lot of the work can be automated.


I'm not sure you do understand - Load iPod Songs To Foobar2000 Playlist is exactly 1 playlist which contains all songs on your iPod.

When I first got my iPod, I had several MP3 files that simply got skipped on the iPod as he describes. No amount of magic juju I tried would allow them to play. Finally, total tag removal (using tidymp3.exe) followed by retagging from scratch (using Tag&Rename to add both ID3V2 and ID3V1 tags) solved about 95% of the problem tracks.

I suspect that a tag which is bad enough to corrupt the "do not play" frame that it sits in will break the iPod's playback functionality. It doesn't care about the tag itself, but if it can't understand the frame, it skips it. This is just an educated guess, mind you, I have no real idea how tags are properly added to MP3 files.

All the problem files I had played fine in Winamp, and about half of them would play in iTunes and WMP. Winamp is very, *very* forgiving about bad MP3's.

hello (how are you jeff?),

Using the latest foo_pod version with an iPod mini at the latest firmware level (1.2 - Nov. 2004 IIRC), and when I copy playlists to the iPod, it seems that :
- tracks are copied, and the DB updated accordingly
- playlist are not copied

can anyone confirm ? is there a workaround?

Thanks

I am able to confirm this with 0.9.9c. I'll try to get a fix released soon.

Thanks for the bug report!

Version 0.9.9d is now available.

This bug fix release fixes the playlist bug reported by NEMO7538, which was introduced in Version 0.9.9 and caused playlists to not be created on the iPod when using the "Send * Playlists To The iPod" features.

Also, one new feature is that if a song has iTunes SoundCheck information in its COMMENT metadata, translate that into a Soundcheck value on the iPod.

Is this an option? I mean, can you use the ReplayGain data instead? It's possible for a file to have both, sort of thing.

Aero,

I think that you could allow sync between play_counts between ipod and fb2k if the user install this mod version of foo_playcount. It stores the counts in a external database using sqlite (so no tagging). If you will interested in implementing this, you could also point to this mod version as the only to be used with foo_pod to get this sync working.

If someone could allow quicktag to use sqlite as this mod does, this would also solve the rating sync issues.

I don't normally have a drive letter assigned to my iPod when I connect it to my USB port (I can only get this in iTunes if I enable disk access), so how do I mount it? I went to "Select iPod To Use" and had it automatically find an iPod, but all it does is minimize fb2k...what am I doing wrong?

Sorry, I forgot to mention that this is only a supplement to ReplayGain - RG always takes precedence. In other words, if both iTunes' iTunNORM and ReplayGain information is available, foo_pod will use ReplayGain.

The iPod must show up as a drive letter. So like you said, you have to enable disk access (either in iTunes or in foo_pod's iPodService preference) to use foo_pod with your iPod.

Interesting. Would you mind doing a little research on this for me, since there doesn't seem to be any details in the post and I'm not familiar with the component.

In particular, what would I need to do in order to utilize this? Just set the metadata (PLAY_COUNT?) as normal? And does this prevent the metadata from being written to the file?

Sure, if I can help.


I'm not sure to understand your question, but I'll try

This component seems to use two metadata fields:

%__play_counter% (as opposite to the %play_counter% tag)
%__play_timestamp% (in a Unix format I think, but just guessing)

And it uses whatever the user puts into the optional fields (where normally people enter %play_time%, %play_date% or %last_played%) and put it into the proper metadata fields (%__play_date% or %__play_date% or %__last_played%).

I guess that you could just do a $add(%ipod_play_counter%,%__play_counter%) into the %__play_counter% metadata.

I see that foo_pod also uses %ipod_last_played_time% in a numeric format. It could also be transfered to fb2k files into whatever file user has specified i.e.
if user uses %last_played% field (which is the newest recommended format) with this format %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S, then with sync foo_pod should update a metadata field called %__last_played% with this format specified.

Hope that this makes sense. You could also contact kode54, he's the author of this mod playcount and could help you more than me

Big news for iPod Shuffle owners! The latest firmware update fixes compatability with non-iTunes AAC files. I haven't tested Nero's encoder yet, but FAAC 1.24 created files play fine with firmware 1.1.

One warning - after doing the update, go to your iPod Shuffle in Windows Explorer and delete the iPod_Control\iTunes\iTunesStats file. It will be 0 bytes, and if you don't remove it, foo_pod 0.9.9d will crash when you try to read the iPod database. I'll fix this in a future version.

For you 3G owners, the latest update (version 2.3) also brings now new stuff (about time, it's been almost a year since 2.2).

The download is a whopping 43 meg. Guess they've added a lot of new firmware types since the last update..

The main stuff this release seems to do is bring the older models up to date with the newer menu system.
-The "Browse" menu is gone, replaced by the "Music" menu which is basically the same.
-There's a new "Audiobooks" menu under the Music menu. You can even put it on the Main Menu if you like (I do).
-There's a new "Shuffle Songs" toggle that you can put onto the Main Menu. I'm not very happy with it, as basically all it does is to start playing all the songs on the iPod, shuffled. Fairly annoying that it can't be used to toggle the normal shuffle setting on/off easily. I turned it back off when I found what it did.
-The charging screen now shows a continous battery with 8 steps instead of the 4 blocks it had before. I think it looks cooler. Easier to see too.

I probably missed some bits, and I haven't looked at the actual files on it yet to see the differences, but since they say it's iTunes 4.7 capable, I'm assuming it supports some of the newer internal file differences. Not much to explore there though.

Edit: Ahh, I missed the multiple On The Go playlists. Those are now on the 3G's.

still no luck with nero

Aero,

Thanks, working fine now. Just a quick question about Enable Synch...this only applies to audio files and nothing else on the iPod, I hope? (i.e. it won't touch any other files I have stored on there?)

Aero - I have spent a little time looking at the Foobar SDK and it looks like it should support all the metadata/"media library" functionality you would need to do your playcount/ratings/GUID storage. Much of it looks to be in metadb.* and metadb_handle.*.

I haven't actually tried writing any test components to see how these functions behave but here's a few that I ran into looking through the SDK source.



I'm not sure if there is a get_metadb_handles_matching_meta_field() type of function in there, I'm not too familiar with this code. Obviously it can be done manually by iterating over the list returned by get_all_entries(), using handle_query_meta_field(), which is probably what the SDK would have to do if it does provide such a function already. I would doubt the meta fields are indexed.

I also see that the author of foo_dbsearch apparently created a mini SDK for database querying, this seems to simplify things quite a bit:
http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uzbs/fb2k/foo_dbsearch

Hope this helps!

That's correct - foo_pod won't delete anything that isn't in the database (i.e. music only).

Do you mean that Nero encoded AAC files don't play on the Shuffle, even with firmware 1.1?

Edit: Yeah, it looks like FAAC 1.24 works, but Nero's AAC encoder (I tested aacenc.dll 2.9.9.96) doesn't work with iPod Shuffle firmware 1.1. In fact, if anything Nero encoded AAC files seem to be a little worse with 1.1 - before, they just wouldn't play. Now, some of them appear to lock up the Shuffle completely...

Just wanted to say that I was able to make my iPod display Hebrew by hacking the fonts in the firmware using iPodWizard and using masstagger to create alternate tags that correspond to the replaced characters and to flip the text. It works and looks really great and the single only problem is that if the title is too long and the iPod puts elipses, it omits the beginning of the title instead of ending, because the title is flipped. So, I was just wondering if anyone is interested in this, becasue I know I would be if I hadn't fixed it for myself already.

Also, seeing that the 3G now supports multiple on-the-go playlists, I was also wondering if anyone knew whether the 3G now also supports line out SoundCheck. Does it?

No, line output is unchanged. I just tested it on mine. Play a song, plug some speakers into the top connector, toggle soundcheck on and off. That works. Do the same using the line output, no change.

Hey there! Nice nifty updates there, but encountered a small problem here... Was wondering if someone could help me out here:

I currently have 2172 songs in the DB, but when I went to the iPod_Control\iTunes\Music folder to do a "Folder Properties" check, it showed 2174 files.

Which means that I've got 2 orphaned files...

Is there any particular function in foo_pod which allows me to search for orphaned files, and adds them into the iTunesDB itself? Restoring the DB is a nightmare, where all my playlists (both smart and dumb, as I so call it ) are set and defined.

I clicked the "Fix Skipped Songs on the iPod" (without knowing what it was for), and it showed this:



It prompted me that 85 songs were found, but the song count in the DB still showed 2172 songs.

Any gives for this? Am using 0.9.9d (or whatever the last revision was, I've lost count. )

EDIT: I've realised that the "Fix Skipped Songs on iPod function renamed the files on my iPod, but it did not update them accordingly on my iPodDB... Gotta rebuild the DB.

Nah, I somehow dislike these animations on transfers.
Why not go for something more PIXELIZED

like this ersatz :

I get the following warning when I load my iPod playlists:
WARNING (foo_pod) : Unable to parse Play Counts file 'v:\iPod_Control\iTunes\Play Counts' (error 13)

Is there something I can do to fix this?

Please send me the v:\iPod_Control\iTunes\Play Counts file so I can take a look at this.

Rebuilding the database now (as of a few versions ago) retains your smart playlists. Normal playlists, however, are not able to be recreated.


85 songs means that 85 songs with illegal (at least on some iPods) filenames were found and fixed. They should have been fixed in both the iPodDB and renamed on the iPod - otherwise, this feature wouldn't be very useful.

That's pretty nice, although the 3G iPod is way out of date (even if it is the best looking of the iPod series, IMHO). If you would be willing to do the opposite animation (data flowing out of the iPod into Foobar) as well as an animation for deleting songs, I would defiinitely consider replacing the existing animations.

First off, thanks for a great plugin Aero! Second, I'm a little confused about Replaygain/iTunesNORM. I read in an earlier post that if a file has Replaygain info, then this will be used in the ipod db? Do Replaygain and iTunesNORM from iTunes achieve the same thing? Would it make more sense to scan all of my music as an album in order to achieve similar volume levels? Sorry this might be a bit of a newbie post!