Question: Now that "Refresh Ipod Library Metadata" is gone, what should we use to upload our track plays to last.fm?

Just rewrite database, or a normal sync if you use that. (Basically, any command that modifies the device.) That other command was never the best one to use..

I always used "Rewrite iPod database", as recommended in the foo_audioscrobbler changelog when foo_dop support was first added. That's still there.

Transparent art problem: fixed Awesome!
Just curious though, why does dop transfer all the art after the audio files? It might make more sense to send the art along with each file at a time, although I dont know if this would be inefficient from a CPU standpoint.

I'd hazard a guess that it keeps track which files use which art while uploading the files, then only uploads a single copy of each art file into the artwork database on the iPod.

Also, not writing the artwork database while copying files to the iPod might also reduce filesystem fragmentation.

And since I'm curious - what was it that made the iPod show half-transparent JPGs? It's not as if there were a transparency value in the JPG format...

Great!

It's just design/technical reasons really.. Fragmentation of the .ithmb files is a concern, it causes some issues on older iPods, but that's not the real reason because it can be avoided by preallocating space. It just gets incredibly complicated mixing it in with the implementation of multi-threaded transcoding (apart from the conversion/replaygain threads, there is another thread which tags and moves files to the iPod album by album... basically it's very complicated) and the way the component groups tracks into albums/groups (it doesn't do this until it has finished copying tracks, and these are stored in the iPod database).

It was basically the first thing I thought it could have been... According to the XML properties file from the device the artwork bitmaps were supposed to be stored in RGB555. I thought that maybe they were using the last bit for the transparency, but I expected it to be transparent if it was set and opaque if it was unset. So I verified that the component wasn't setting it and left it until now when I got those .ithmb files which alphaex32 luckily included which showed the difference compared to iTunes...

Ah, thank you both.

1. The album named the album Quartet and "Quartet" is registered in iPod.
2. When the album list is displayed, the same album as "Quartet", Quartet, "Quartet", and Quartet is repeatedly displayed.
3. There was no problem before foo_dop-0.5.4-TEST.7z.

I've seen something similar to this. I had an album called "The Warning" and other called "Warning", and in my album list on the iPod "Warning" and "The Warning" were listed repeatedly under W (maybe 10 times)

I'm still having trouble with a smart playlist based on ratings. It is only detecting a small number of songs and I'm not sure why these songs are showing up when none of the hundreds of other songs I have rated aren't.

XAX & PlazzTT: Thanks, I'll fix this for the next version.

bort: It will work of what is in the iPod's database. The latest version will pick up ratings not stored as normal metadata when setting metadata in the database. That won't automatically affect existing tracks on the iPod; the update metadata command should sort that or alternatively you can remove and re-send them.

Is there any way to change metadata mappings on the ipod? For example, I had mapped %album artist% as artist, but now I want the artist to be normal while mapping %album artist% to compilation instead. I tried syncing, updating the metadata, and rewriting the database after changing these fields to no avail.

Edit: Two things: I'm running a 5G on Vista and the second link on the very first post in this thread is dead.

1. You need to do "Load library" then select affected files and do "iPod/Update Metadata..." in context menu.
2. Works here but changed anyway

Thanks alot for the great plugin - worked flawlessly for me so far on my 5G

I've got a little feature request: would it be possible to set "Skip when shuffling" and "Remember playback position" for several files simultaneously? (I have Audiobooks consisting of hundreds of files and it would be nice if i could exclude them from shuffling whithout going mad )

Yes I guess the properties window in Manage contents needs a multiple track mode. Actually though normally the iPod would activate those automatically for Audiobooks with m4b or aa extension/format.. however those aren't supported by foobar2000 (we can ignore .aa but .m4b could be added).

As an alternative, you can tag your files with IPOD_SKIP_WHEN_SHUFFLING and IPOD_REMEMBER_PLAYBACK_POSITION set to 1. Not the nicest way but it's an option for now..

I may just add remappings for these as well, as I modified the config page to accommodate more in next version. This would help you if you can work out if these tracks are audiobooks based upon metadata.

Probably you already know but you could also just set these on the iPod using iTunes (for now).

Maybe not the nicest way, but it does the job - thanks for the hint. Yet a multiple track mode would be a nice thing to have indeed!

I have all of these audiobooks as mp3, ripped track-by-track from cd (because my old mp3 player wasn't capable of resuming playback). I guess it isn't possible to have mp3s filed as audiobooks on the ipod anyway?

However you could map the genre-tag to enable both options, so that one could specify the kind of genres handled as audiobooks.

Thanks again for your effort!

Love the plugin! Is there any chance you would consider adding support for iTunes-style "chapters," so that single-file podcasts and albums with chapter-stops can be added via foo_dop? I realize it's probably not on everyone's wishlist, but it would be a wonderful addition to an already impressive product.

For reference, iTunes chapters are specified by a timed text track, which can be added to any *.m4a container using the "QuickTime Friendly" build of MP4Creator.

- M.

Hey musicmusic,

I was just checking out the change log for foo_dop, and it has a log up to version 6.2, but all I can find is 6.1.1. Where is 6.2?

I don't believe so, in a non-hacky way anyway.

I'll have a look at some point, but I reckon it will be a bit complicated.

On my hard drive at the moment Probably will release it today sometime.

0.6.2 released. See changelog for details.

Notes:

• After upgrading, you will need to reconfigure conversion settings
• After upgrading, you will need to reconfigure your artwork source script to not specify a file extension
• There is now a DirectShow based video thumbnailer. It is opt-in, in case some screwy DirectShow filters you have installed decide to explode. But anyway, the combo of Haali Media Splitter and ffdshow seem to work fine for me. If you have this enabled it still looks for artwork via the normal methods first.

The sync seems to be playing nice with mediamonkey now (dop still recognizes files it's synced even after mediamonkey modifies the db). It would be nice if dop could recognize duplicates of files sent by other programs during sync, but I guess this would be really difficult to do accurately. Anyway, Im hoping to ditch itunes and mediamonkey completely now that foo_dop has gotten so good.

Quick request...could you have the "send to ipod" command use a similar sync confirmation dialog to show files that it will skip?

Hello,

is it posible that the iPod sorts the albums by release year (stored in the date tag) instead of sorting them alphabetical order ?

Thanks in advance
Alex

After updating to 0.6.2 very strange things happened to my ipod database: some (but not all) of the artists appear dozens of times on the ipod; same for the album view. An example how it looks like:

A
B
C
D
C
D
C
D
C
D
C
D
C
D
E
F

However, if I load the library to foobar, there ain't such dublicates. I tried to rewrite database, re-sync but it doen't help any

Oops, I knew I was forgetting something Should be sorted now though in 0.6.2.1 (Just do a rewrite database)

I don't know.. it isn't something that needs confirming, and also if you knew which files you didn't want sending you could deselect them in the first place. I could maybe put it in the results dialog though. I may just add an option to make send files (not sync) a bit more fuzzy.

The field may vary between tracks.. so I would need some tricks to work around that. Maybe. You can use a remapping as an alternative though.

Hi,
thanks for your quick reply.
I am relatively new to this all, how do I remap ??

Thanks in advance
Alex

Go to Preferences > Tools > iPod Manager > Database and enter the following in the Album mapping box:

['('%date%') ']%album%

Then do a rewrite database.

Suuper, thank you very much. If that works I can get rid of the stupid years in my Album Tag (for example "1978 Heavy Horses")

Thanks again
Alex

Rewrite database is *not* the correct method to apply those settings to the existing tracks, if you have the latest version just press help to see the instructions or alternatively they are here.

Currently, I have this under Compilation on foo_dop: $if($stricmp($directory(%_path%,2),'Various Artists'),1,0)

How do I change that code to make it so that as well as putting mp3s I have in my Various Artists folder into compilation, it will display the tracks on my iPod as "Artist - Title" ?

That's what works fine for me - it'll map the album artist to the artist and put the artist into the track title if artist and album artist don't match; plus it'll mark all files with an album artist of "various artists" (ignoring the case) as a compilation.

Apologies. I thought given that every file on the iPod would be affected by the remapping rewrite database would be the thing to do.

Now that was a quick fix. Thanks!


How about an "Auto-Update Metadata" on the file/iPod menu, to update all metadata on the ipod from library? Would save some clicks!

Another feature suggestion: on the recover orphaned tracks functionality could be shown a list of which files are to be recovered, or even better: a possibility to select which to recover and which to delete (cause most times it'll be doubletes anyway).

It was there, but it was removed because it did things people didn't intend. For example, video files sent with other programs would lose some of their metadata. But anyway, you can just right click on the library playlist after loading it if you want to do it on all tracks.

I could just send them to a playlist afterwards, so you can examine them/do what you want with them.

Hello,

thank you very much. This works for me. But is it also possible to prevent the date from showing on the iPod ?

Cheers Alex

Hi!

Thank you for the wonderful plug-in. I've been using foobar2000 for many years in Windows, and your plug-in was the last nail on the coffin for any other music players.

Lately I've switched to Linux (foobar2000 was the only reason keeping me away from it), and I get foobar2000 working pretty well through WINE. However, I can't get your plug-in to work with it, and it keeps saying that no IPOD has been found.

Is there some trick I can do?

I apologize if this has come up before. Ijust find it annoying having to switch to Windows to load the IPOD.

That's not possible currently, you can refer back to my original reply.

You could try connecting the iPod before starting foobar2000, but I don't think it will help. Anyway, you should file a bug against Wine.

Hi MM.

I'm still experiencing issues synching my iPod Touch with foo_dop 0.6.2.1: apparently all files are sent every time I try this operation.

To test it, I erased my iPod, sent a Playlist of about 1000 songs and, when complete, tried a sync of the same playlist: all files where listed in the preview window as to be removed (and sent, of course).

Thanks for your time.

Alessandro

I had a similar problem where about 140 files out of ~3000 on my 30GB iPod video were always getting re-synced.

Turns out that the tags Foobar2000 had cached for both the files in my media library and the files on my iPod were out of sync, so foo_dop always detected a discrepancy.

The solution - open the iPod library, select all files, choose "Tagging > Reload info from files" from the context menu, then do the same with the files in my foobar2000 library.

That sorted it out for good...

Of course, before doing this you can just open up the properties window for a file on your iPod and the same file in your media library and check if there's a difference...

Hi Leak and thanks for taking time to reply.

I confess I did not fully understand your explanation (how a foobar cache can affect operations on a freshly formatted iPod?) but nevertheless I followed the above instructions: unfortunately it made no difference.

I also tried reloading the tags of my playlist but still no luck.

Note that in my case all files seem to be synched, not just a subset (well, I didn't count the objects in the sync preview actually, so I'm not 100% sure of that).

Alessandro

mobyduck: It "should" work with files sent by foo_dop, but as you maybe know I don't have a touch to actually test. I can't see a reason why it shouldn't work, and also I'm sure it was working for someone else. Maybe you can experiment with just a few files to see if you can find out anything (but really, things are just a bit complicated with the iPhone/iPod touch). Are relevant is whether they are transcodes and whether you use other iPod management apps (iTunes or others).

Hi musicmusic.

Yes, I understand it's not easy for you to support those devices.

Not sure what you mean with whether they are transcodes...

WRT other apps, I have iTunes installed but I only use foobar to manage my music.

Anyway, I can live with resetting my iPod and resending the whole playlist every once in a while... so thanks anyway for your work.

Alessandro

Can you check whether they have a "yes" under "In DopDB" on "Manage contents"?

Yes, selecting the playlist in Manage contents all songs are marked as "yes".

Alessandro

Okay... I've come up with an idea, but will need your help MusicMusic.

I want to dual boot my iPod in a non-traditional way.

That's not the poroblem here, the problem is this...
I want to change my iPod's music directory from:
"iPod:/iPod Control/Music"
to
"iPod:/iPod Control/Music1"

I am able to mod the iPod's firmware to look in the latter instead of the original path, but this didn't work. So I am guessing that the database that your foo_dop writes will also need to know of the change in directory.
Is there anyway of doing this???

At the end of it, I would like to have a dual boot with one firmware looking in "iPod:/iPod Control/Music1" for its music and the other firmware looking in "iPod:/iPod Control/Music2" for its music.
I can deal with the firmware part, but I need your help for the database bit.

Is there any such way of easily allowing such a change???


Cheers.

You can't change the path foo_dop uses by default (well, if you are editing the firmware maybe you know how to edit the component). But you can do it manually if you put the tracks wherever you want and use "Send to iPod" (if you move the tracks using foobar2000, you can save the re-reading metadata part).

Or if you use something like Musi1 instead of Music1 then you can just edit the database with a hex-editor (I am assuming you don't have a current model which have hash protected databases, but that's easy to overcome anyway)..

But don't you also have the issue of making the component/iPod read two different databases?

Where does the iPod get told to read your database? And does it Have to be called "dopdb"?



So foo_dop reads the component/iPod and according to where the iPod tells it, this is where foo_dop will write the files to?

No.. realistically you are going to need to have two iPod_Control directories.. There are various databases etc. (iTunesDB, ArtworkDB, ..) and you would need the two different firmware reading them , as well as the component. Where the component looks for the databases is coded into the component, you can't configure it.

Can't you just have your second firmware as maybe Rockbox or iPod linux and create a script for it that just renames directories so you can use it purely for switching between the two folders?

Can you please explain 'component'?

I will get back to you on the two separate iPod_Control directories...

The component in this case is "iPod manager" i.e. foo_dop.dll.