My friend show me Foobar2000 last night, and I really like it so far. But the thing is, I've been using iTunes with my iPod and everything for a long time. I have play lists set up, songs rated, and my music is all organized into folders like iTunes likes (Artist -> Album -> ## Song.mp3). Now the only thing keeping me from using Foobar2000 is basicaly all of these things. Can I bring my play lists over? Can I bring my Smart Playlists over? Will my ratings show up? Can I update my iPod?

I can't give you much, except the foo_pod plug-in

View thread here and here.

Alright, thanks.

What about the other things I mentioned?

Not sure what playlist format i-tunes uses, so I can't tell you wether you can import those. You certainly wont be able to use your smart playlists in fb2k.

However there is an autoplaylists component in 0.9 beta. So you can use that and set up your own fb2k "smart lists".

As to the folder structure. FB2K allows you to use whatever folder structure you like for your music. And if they are tagged properly you can use the Masstagger to create any folder structure you like automatically based on file tags.

I am also not sure how i-tunes stores rating. In case it stores it in the file tags you should be able to read that from within fb2k if you know how exactly what i-tunes calls it's rating tag.

I'm not really sure how to see how it stores the ratings. All I've really done is convert all the iTunes tags to ID3v1 in iTunes so that they would show properly in Foobar. Though from applying certain configs, I can see I need to do some editing to the tags to make everything show completely correct.

Try to check the file properties from within the fb2k right click menu and see if you can find any tag called "rating" or something similar.

Maybe someone who has more experience with i-tunes than I have can shed some light on this issue.

Checked the properties and didn't see anything about iTunes rating.

Changing to ID3v1 will cause you to lose long song titles (over 31 chars) and will also not keep any additional info like rateings, etc that iTunes might write to its tags. You need to use ID3v2 if you want to keep these.

Yeah I discovered that some titles had shortened... I'll convert them to ID3v2. Will this show all of iTunes tags? Rating... last played, etc?

Only if the files where you convert the tags still have the original i-tunes tags. Not if you just convert the current id3v1 tags to id3v2.

I'm using iTunes to convert. So it should be converting the iTunes information into the tags.

Ok their all converted and its not displayed. I did some googling on the iTunes tags and it looks like iTunes doesn't store that information in the MP3 at all, just in its DB.

The only I've really used the rating system for was to rate songs 5 stars, and then a Smart Playlist would display all of the 5 star songs. Basicaly making it easier for me to add songs to my favorites play list when I just have my iPod.

I guess I'll finish going through and fixing the tags in iTunes, then re organize the folder structure in Foobar.

Can you somehow get iTunes to group all the 5 star songs into one playlist and then export that playlist to something like m3u or other format foobar understands? If so, you could just load the playlist in foobar and rate those songs 5 stars in foobar.

Ahh. I found a xml to .m3u converter online, so that I could bring the playlist into Foobar. To bad I already re-structured my folders so that the files all point to the wrong places... But I still have the songs on my iPod so I could probably bring 'em on to my PC and do it again.