Well, this sounds to me like there's something new in the iPod's DB that's causing an issue.

Aero, you might want to compare an iTunes 4.8 created MHYP (on an 3G or 4G iPod with the latest firmware) with the ones you're creating and see what's different there. I think they've added something new to it that the iPod is now expecting to see.

Edit: There's some posts over in the iPodLinux forum suggesting that the UTF16/UTF8 string encoding flag in the MHOD has changed. Somebody says that it's flipped now. I haven't checked yet, but this could be a real problem if true. Might start there.

I downloaded and installed iTunes 4.8 (ick), and used it to create a playlist on my 4G iPod called "æropod". The encoding for the MHYP's MHOD was indeed 1, and the string was most definitely UTF-16 encoded. The database version is still 0x0c, which I would have expected to be bumped up if Apple did make a significant change.

And I'm not sure that anything has necessarily changed or should be causing problems. I have never personally seen UTF-8 strings in the iTunesDB (there are non-UTF16 encoded strings in the Photo Database, but it could be straight ANSI strings for all I know). The default hidden playlist's name was also encoded in UTF-16, and the encoding value was 1.

Anyway, foo_pod was able to correctly display the playlist (including the æ character), and I was able to add a song to the iTunes 4.8 created playlist, and the song and playlist appeared correctly on the iPod.

I then deleted the playlist in foo_pod, created a new playlist with the same name, and sent it and a file to the iPod. It displayed correctly on the iPod (again with the æ character), and when I opened up iTunes 4.8, iTunes displayed the playlist and name correctly. This was with the mhod::encoding value set to 0.

So unless I'm missing something, there is nothing to see here. iTunes and the iPod seem to ignore mhod::encoding, if indeed that is really what it is. foo_pod doesn't seem to have any problems reading playlists created by iTunes and vice versa. nchase's problem might be a side-effect of my recent attempted fix of the transcoded playlist problem. That turned out to be the wrong fix, and I am going to back it out and release a new version of foo_pod.

Edit: Note that this test was done with the fixed version of 0.9.9i (more or less equivalent to 0.9.9h), so any 0.9.9i problems people have been encountering wouldn't have shown up here.

I think this is a side-effect of the attempted fix for the "transcoded songs not appearing in playlists". I'm going to post an update shortly, so please test that and see if it helps. It will remove the fix for transcoded songs, but should make normal playlists work again.



There is a section in the Readme file if you are interested. It is somewhat out of date (I did lose my iPod Photo, but I ended up buying another one anyway...). The number of donations currently stand at one (), but honestly, I don't want anyone to feel obligated to donate anything other than bug reports and suggestions (and praise, as warrented!).



This definitely sounds like a side-effect of the transcoded song/playlist fix. Send File doesn't add songs to the playlist, while Send Playlist does try to create the playlists and add the songs. Hopefully the update will take care of the problem.

OttoFill is currently very dumb - it just tries sending files until the list is empty. The size of the list depends on your iPod's disk space - I want it to be a big enough number to ensure that the iPod is filled up, but not so big that it tries to send way too many files.

I'll make the out of disk space message a little less obnoxious as a quick fix.

I agree, that value seems not to actually be the encoding type. It might be the encoding for the Album Art database's mhod's, but it doesn't seem to be anything yet known for the iTunesDB file. Clearly these two files are not entirely identical formats anyway.

I've corrected the wiki.

Hi there anybody help please

I use EAC to create CD images that are then compressed to FLAC and use an embeddded cusheet file so i only have 1 file per CD

When i convert to mp3 in foobar normaly then foobar splits the FLAC's in mp3's at there propper points however when i use foo_pod it make ONE super huge mp3 and copys that to my iPod Photo

Can anyone tell me why foo_pod dosen't split up my files

Also does anyone know of any good software to send pics to my iPod photo instead of iTunes

Thanks

This has been discussed many, many times in this forum. foo_pod currently does not completely support cue sheets. Several people have requested this, and I will get around to implementing it sooner or later.



Album art or pictures in the Photo Library? I am probably going to do both at some point, but otherwise, I don't know of any application, other than iTunes, that can upload photos to the iPod.

Aero, thanks for the updated foo_pod. The issue with track data not 'sticking' to files on my iPod is resolved!

Next on my list to do... a quick and easy way to add album art (nothing is arguably as easy as using Windows Media Player - provided your tags are semi-informative, album art is not a problem - pity about the sound quality and system usage tho )

I've now downloaded most of my album covers (5,000 tracks, a couple of hundread albums.. ugh) but want to map them to my iPod...

Cool.



Quick and easy for you - lots of hard database reverse engineering and programming for me!

I talked about my ideas for album art in this post. I haven't done any work on it yet, and there are a lot of other things that are competing for my time, so I can't even give a rough estimate when I might have something ready to test.

Thanks for the help Aero. Let us know when you get your picture and album program out. foo_pod rocks

I would actually like to know if I'm not the only one having the issue with sending playlists and some songs end up fubared (no pun intended) and only part of the playlist showing up. Sending 500 songs in a single playlist of varying bit rates and varying file types, only 400 show up, this sort of thing (including transcoded files).

Version 0.9.9j is now available.


This version should fix the problems people have recently been having with playlists. Unfortunately, it reverts the fix for transcoded songs and playlists added in 0.9.9i, so I'll have to find a better way to fix that.

I also added a new feature that I have already found is very useful - Cull 1 Star Songs. This menu item will search your iPod for 1 star songs and delete them. This doesn't touch unrated songs, or songs with 2 - 5 stars, and it will prompt you with the number of songs it is planning to delete before doing anything.

The reason I wanted to add this is that after I have listened to a podcast, I typically want to delete it. But if I'm away from a computer, it isn't always easy to remember which files I wanted to delete. So now, I can mark the song with a single star, and use the Cull feature to automatically remove it when I am connected.



From the Readme:

Aero, I was just moaning about iTunes' crap album art functionality - I wouldn't want to be the one trying to make foo_pod album art work like WMPlayer! The important thing is that foo_pod removes the need to even have iTunes installed, and its just about there, I think!!!

Having my first major problem with my iPod photo 30GB - all the songs on my iPod 'appear' to have disappeared (can't find anything on my iPod, but the songs are still there on the iPod hard disk). I've tried using iTunes DB rebuild in foo_pod 0.9.9i, with no luck. I'm trying it again with 0.9.9j, let's see what happend?

Can anyone offer any advice or pointers? Anyone else experienced this?

I had this problem...for some reason when I installed and ran iTunes and it detected my iPod it was fixed though. I'm quite clueless about what the problem actually is, but you may want to just try running iTunes if you haven't already.

I don't know how WMP handles album art, but I assume it just looks for an image in the same directory as the songs?


Anytime you (or anyone) has a really weird problem like that, please send your iTunesDB file (found in the iPod_Control\iTunes folder on your iPod) to foopod(at)argz.com. If you want to send before/after files, that would be helpful too.

Nope, provided you have enough track info in the tags (title, artist and album tend to do the job), WMP will automatically find the artwork, download it and display it. It stores the downloaded art as a large and small jpg file in the directory where the album is located.

Just got an iPod and I can't thank you enough for the plug-in, I didn't even install iTunes just went straight to using your component.

I was wondering if you were thinking about adding support for .cue files, in the sense that it would split up one big ass MP3 file into separate tracks that could be played on the iPod.

I'm having serious issues with 0.9.9i onwards. My database seems to have got completely corrupted, forunately I was able to back up my 28GB or so of songs and restore my iPod. Rolled back my foo_pod build to a version from around 3 weeks ago which works 100%. Unfortunately my backups are 50 miles away and saved on a 10 year old's laptop!!

No offense Porshe, but this isn't exactly official software, and it is kindof a beta. You really are using it at your own risk and as such, should have you music backed up some place close and reliable. Also, when that happens, make sure you send Aero our iTunesDB as per his instructions with what you were doing and what happened along with your iPod version, software version, etc.

WMP has a feature similar to musicmatch's smart tagging. If it can identify a song well enough, it'll download the album art (and tag info) and will even move the file around in your directory structure if you tell it to do so, and so forth.

Long story short, all you really have to do to support album art and be compatible with WMP and a whole host of other apps that default to the defacto similar method is to check the same folder as the file is in for a "folder.jpg" and you can pretty safely assume that is the album cover.

Supporting APIC frames in ID3v2 tags would also be nice, and I know other tags have that sort of capability too, but that might be a bit too much for a first draft, sort of thing.

Sorry, I know somewhere on the 57+ pages this has probably been answered. I tried a search to no avail.

I was wondering about multiple ipods w/ foo_pod and how it handles them

Porschephile actually did send me his iTunesDB file, even before his post. I haven't done extensive testing yet, but I did verify it loaded in foo_pod without error, so there must be something else going on when it is loaded on the iPod.

Also, you should be able to rebuild the iTunesDB in foo_pod. This simply scans your iPod for songs and recreates a new working database - none of your songs should be lost.

I don't plan to support the embedded images in the ID3v2 tags (mainly because as far as I know, Foobar2000 doesn't support it), but I will do the folder.jpg searching.

foo_pod has pretty good support for multiple iPods. You can only access one at a time, switching between them using the "Select iPod To Use" menu item. I map Select iPod to Control-Shift-I in Foobar, so I can easily switch between two or more iPods.

One feature that I use quite a bit is the option in OttoFill to select songs from another iPod. This is really nice for use with an iPod Shuffle, since you can plug both your main iPod and the Shuffle in, then automatically fill up the Shuffle with random songs from the main iPod.

Actually, if/when you do update the plug-in to v0.9, cover art in tags is actually supported properly. foobar2000 no longer deletes binary data from tags...

Thanks for the info. Do you know if there is an interface for getting at the binary data, or just that it isn't deleted when you write tags?

Since 0.9 apparently breaks existing plugins, whether I update foo_pod or not will probably depend on how much work it would take update the code to the 0.9 SDK.

Now that's worrisome!

Alessandro

That is worrisome. It should not take a huge amount of effort to update foo_pod to support 0.9. A few edits, and a recompile with the new SDK and you should be fine. In terms of features, 0.9 has some significant advantages and I would be sorely disapointed if foo_pod was not updated.

Is there even a 0.9 SDK available? I don't see anything on the beta page, and in fact, I haven't really even seen a list of new features in 0.9.

foo_podders:

First, big thanks to Aero, Otto, and all others involved in this fabulous plugin. I've been living without iTunes for a few months now, and have absolutely no regrets.

I thought I'd share my simple IPOD_LAST_PLAYED_TIME conversion TAGZ-script. Anyone using this will have to modify the variable 'gmtCorrection' for their appropriate timezone. Please fee free to modify/clean as you see fit.


It's kinda ugly, but that's my solution given the limitations of TAGZ-script!

No. Its not going to be released until the beta is over in order to discourage beta testers from using 3rd party plugins (and reporting problems with them).

stevekim:

That looks plakomkex. What exactly does it do or improve on. I don't code and that looks like latin translated to aramaic translated to chinese to me.

Thanks!


That is some pretty impressive coding!

Edit: If it would be useful, I could add another metadata item that could be formatted according to a foo_pod preference item. Something like a strftime() format string?

Hmm, that is very odd and, frankly, discouraging. I'm fairly certain that the SDK was released during the beta phase of previous Foobar releases (I have been writing components since 0.6).

I think your last sentence could be slightly reworked:
"Its not going to be released until the beta is over in order to discourage developers from writing 3rd party plugins."

Well, this doesn't really do anything new - it just reformats some data for human-readability. When tracks are played on the iPod, a variable called 'IPOD_LAST_PLAYED_TIME' gets updated to reflect the (you guessed it) time the track was played. However, this is stored as the number of seconds elapsed since Jan 1, 1970 - which is not too intuitive. The above tagzscript simply converts this big integer number of seconds to a more digestable form of "YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm" format.

To use this, I put the code (including the '#script 1') into the 'Display' tab of a ColumnsUI column.

I seem to recall that someone, somewhere in this long thread asked about a way to format it. Here it is:
Link

Enjoy!

Thanks, Aero! While I was fiddling around with the tagzscript, I was wondering where the "IPOD_LAST_TIME_PLAYED" value came from. Am I correct in assuming that it is derived from iTunesDB/PlayCounts data, but then modified by foo_pod? While poking around the iTunesDB/PlayCounts databases, I saw that the iPod understands epoch time as Jan 1, 1904. So I'm assuming that foo_pod does converstion to Unix epoch.

At any rate, the ability to format the date through foo_pod to some user-definable format like strftime() would be great! If you're willing to put in the work, I'm willing to submit the feature request!

Folks,

saw that there was already a lot of discussion about VA here, but is hard to track through the 58 pages.

I am currently planning to have all VA songs and relevant tags changed in the following way:

%artist% = Various
%title% = artist - title
%album% = album

This gives me a less long artist listing at the IPOD as all various artist songs are listed with various.

Any feedback ? (hope you don't mind me listing that question here)

use album artist. eg:

%album artist% = Various Artist
%artist% = Track Artist
%title% = Title
%album% = Album

thought also about that tag, but iPod doesn't list that one, does it ?

foo_podders:

Aero will not have access to posts on the forum for a few days. If you don't get quick replies from him in the meantime, don't panic.

Steve

I've tried reinstalling foobar2000, using several different versions of foo_pod, and uninstalling/reinstalling iTunes, but after I get to a certain number of songs on my 40gb 3rd generation iPod (the barrier seems to be ~4500), whatever database is written seems to be plagued by error 13, making foo_pod write the backup database and cutting access off to hundreds of songs. Is there anything I can do to stop this from happening?

No it does not, but you can use formatting strings to correct this.

On the Advanced tab in the foo_pod preferences, I use the following.

Title: $if($stricmp(%album artist%,'Various Artists'),%title%' (Performed By '%artist%')',%title%)
Artist: $if2(%album artist%,%artist%)
Album: $if($or($stricmp(%album%,'Greatest Hits'),$stricmp(%album%,'Number Ones')),$if2(%album artist%,%artist%)': '%album%,%album%)
Genre: %genre%
Composer: %composer%
Comment: %comment%
Tracknumber: $num(%tracknumber%,2)

This causes the output to look like the following:

One Artist Album:
Title: Walk Of Life
Artist: Dire Straits
Album: Brothers In Arms

One Artist, with featuring artists:
Title: The Boys Of Summer
Artist: Don Henley
Album: The Perfect Beast
(Even though this song is performed by Don Henley & Steve Porcaro, it just shows the Album Artist, Don Henley, on your iPod)

Multiple Artists:
Artist: Various Artists
Title: Superman (Performed By Lazlo Bane)
Album: Music From Scrubs

Greatest Hits/Number Ones Album:
Artist: Journey
Title: Don't Stop Believin'
Album: Journey: Greatest Hits
(Even though the album is called Greatest Hits, because the iPod can't handle albums with the same name properly, the name of the artist gets put on before hand when you have an album named either Greatest Hits, or Number Ones).

To use these tags properly, Album Artist should only be tagged on those files that require it (albums with multiple artists, or albums with guest/feature artists).

kl33per, which tag do you use to indicate a guest/feature artist? I've been using WITH or FEATURING. That's probably non-standard, but it gives me an easy way to clean up TITLE for renaming the file and I can append the tags for display.

I don't, all artists involed in a song get listed under Artist.

Eg.
%ALBUM ARTIST% = Don Henley

Track 1 %Artist% = Don Henley & Steve Porcaro
Track 2 %Artist% = Don Henley, Lindsey Buckingham & Pino Palladino
Track 3 %Artist% = Don Henley, Belinda Carlisle & Charlie Sexton
Track 4 %Artist% = Don Henley & Steve Porcaro
Etc.

Thanks. I understand a bit more now of why %album artist% is used.

kl33per,

I can't seem to get your alternative metadata settings to work. I'm using your Title, Artist, and Album settings.

i.e. if I have:
%album artist%=VA
%artist%=Toto
%title%=Africa
%album%=The 80s
%genre%=80s

Then I think it should appear in the iPod as:

Africa (Performed By Toto)
Various Artists
The 80s

But instead it shows as:

Africa
The 80s
The 80s

Any ideas? btw I already changed "Various Artists" in your string to VA.

I'm assuming you've checked that you're tags are all correct?

Make sure that when you changed 'Various Artists' to 'VA' that the apostrophes are retained.

Other then that, I'm not sure what you're problem is. It works perfectly for me.

Edit: Make sure you've got "Flag Compilation Albums" turned off. That (for some reason) might screw with it.

hey kl33per, thx a lot for your big help... I will check it out later today. Rgds Tom btw nice location, a little too far from Europe.

No worries, yeh, Germany's a long flight.

Yep, it was that "Flag Compilations Albums". Finally got my tracks looking how I want. Thanks!