Thanks DJ. If you do classical, you know classical albums are difficult, because one album may contain numerous pieces by various composers, and the artists on the same album can be an orchestra alone, or an orchestra with soloists. Still not quite sure what to do. The reason I need to keep things iTunes friendly is to sync up my iPhone and iPad with music. I was hoping to actually do an NAS drive with the iTunes music folder that could be read by both the BDP-2 and iTunes, so I would not actually have to copy the ripped file of a new cd to two places (iTunes and Bryston HD). Additionally, I work out of my home office - what's the best way to control the BDP-2 from your Mac destop? And of course, Roon sounds like a great possibility - anyone know how to structure files ripped into iTunes to work with Roon? Any help is appreciate!
For Music:
To copy your iTunes library to your BDP, here is what *I* have done... your mileage may vary. I will give you the abbreviated version and feel free to ask questions, if any of the below seems too technical.
1. Create Track #1 / Album Smart Playlist - in iTunes, create a SmartPlaylist that selects the first track from each album, automatically.
2. Go to DougScripts.com and download the script: Save Album Art JPEG. Then, go into the playlist you created above, select all and run the script. This will place a folder.jpg file into each album folder.
3. I use a tool called GoodSync to copy from /Volumes/Macintosh HD/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music —> MUSIC-1TB/Music (use the options to ignore bdp_front_*.jpg, bdp_front_*.png, System, Hidden files). This step assumes you are using a USB-attached hard drive for your BDP music, called MUSIC-1TB, which I recommend (name it whatever you want).
4. Search/Find all M4V (music videos) and delete (MUSIC-1TB/Music), using the Finder.
5. Run an app called: BlueHarvest to clear Apple file system data form your FAT32 or exFAT USB HDD for your BDP-1 (MUSIC-1TB);
6. Disconnect your USB HDD and connect it to your BDP-1. Reboot the BDP-1, etc... and let the BDP discover your music.
6. Search/Find all folder.jpg files and delete them using the Mac Finder (/Volumes/Macintosh HD/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music). You want to do this, otherwise when you rename or remove albums from iTunes, it will leave an empty folder.
*Note: you don't need to do ANYTHING to prepare your music for the BDP; leave it as you have it organized, today. You may have some issues with Manic Moose parsing the meta data and creating artwork thumbnails, but we will leave that alone for now.
For Playlists:
1. Download an app called: Playlist Export (Apple app store).
2. Use Playlist Export to export your iTunes playlists (all of them, if you like, but I skip the Smart playlists) to a folder on your Mac HDD.
3. When setting up for export, replace the leading paths for playlist entries to match your BDP. In my case, this means replacing:
/Volumes/Macintosh HD/iTunes/iTunes Media --> MUSIC-1TB
4. You will end up with a collection of *.m3u playlists that exactly match your iTunes playlist collection.
5. Activate the Samba service on your BDP (see the Services tab on the Manic Moose dashboard.
6. Sync or copy the playlists into the USER/playlists
7. Again, make sure you have BlueHarvest running and you add the USER/playlists share to it to avoid creating a lot of hidden Mac system files in the playlists folder on your BDP (these annoyingly show up when browsing playlists in MPaD).
8. Update MPD (i.e. the Update link on the upper-left corner of the Manic Moose web app.
Voila, you have iTunes in your BDP. It looks/sounds like a lot, but it goes quickly once you've gone through it. The nice part about using a syncing tool is you can update the USB HDD for your BDP without copying everything over from the beginning.
