[Mike Dzurko]

My wife has a Nano, and she?s convinced me I need to get some form of Ipod myself. We?re leaving on a big trip in a couple weeks and I?d like to buy and get it loaded etc. ASAP.  Hence, I?m being a bit lazy and asking these questions rather than taking a lot of time on research. Uses will include, travel, on the boat, probably in the car, and possibly doing some reading books with some of the Learning Disability kids I work with. 

At home, I have ripped everything we have to FLAC and it?s all stored on external PC hard-drives and feeds a Squeezebox Duet. (since we use PCs and not MACS, I'm asking these questions here). What?s the easiest process to get these files into the Ipod? I know the Ipods don?t do FLAC, and I?ll want smaller files anyway for enough capacity. Is there an easy way for Itunes to convert on the fly to load the Ipod? Will I be able to ?protect? my FLAC files from any modification?

Lastly, I?m open to any and all opinions, ideas about what Ipod to get. Can?t yet decide between the small size and price of a 16gig Nano or perhaps a Classic.

TIA!

[TF1216]

Rockbox

[ebag4]

Rockbox

x2

I run a 5.5g 80G video that I rockboxed and loaded my FLAC files onto, works great!  I noticed a new in box 5th Gen 60G on ebay (also an 80G unit listed as 5th gen but was actually a classic, not compatible with Rockbox).  If you decide to go with a larger capacity iPod and Rockbox it keep in mind that the only units that can be Rockboxed are the units up to 5.5G Video.  The Classic and newer units are not Rockbox compatible.  See rockbox.org for more info.

Best,
Ed

[avta]

You could use Max ( www.sbooth.org ) to convert as many files as you like to one of the Apple compatible formats. You might see if you can hear the difference between converting to MP3 vs Apple Lossless since the space used on your units memory would be quite a bit less with MP3.

[Mike Dzurko]

Thanks folks. The Rockbox idea looks cool, but I want to keep this as simple as possible, and be compatible with my wife's Ipod which she is loading w/ Itunes.

I'll have to take a look at Max

[Wayne1]

Mike,

What program do you use to rip to .flac?

Both dBpoweramp and EasyCD-DAExtractor have conversion utilities to change your .flac files to iPod compatible formats.

You can set up a separate folder just for your iPod music.

Max is a great program, but it is designed to work on MAC OS, not windows.

[Mike Dzurko]

Hey Wayne:

I used DBpoweramp, bought it and love it. I'll check that out this weekend. So it sounds like I can essentially just make a separate folder and leave the original FLACs alone. Keeping the converted Ipod files in a separate location for use w. Itunes?  Thanks!

[stereocilia]

I'm not sure that will work.

I'm following this thread, too; thanks for starting it.  I don't think rockbox will work with my iPod interface in my car, so that's out for me as well.

The situation is also complicated by my wife having a different iTunes library on her iPod than I have.  Too bad there's no easy drag and drop (at least that I've found) to mix formats, players, storage locations, and libraries. I found out the hard way that the library file has to be updated by iTunes, you can't just put the files in the iTunes library and expect them to show up in iTunes.

I tried the batch conversion from apple lossless to flac with dBPoweramp, but for some reason (too many files?) the file naming system where the artist name is the directory (and so on) was not preserved despite my instructions.  I just ended up re-ripping the cd's I had ripped in iTunes.

I hate having to burn a cd twice when I want it on my iPod and in the SqueezeCenter, but I haven't found an elegant way to avoid it.

[JEaton]

What I do for iPods is keep a parallel/mirror library in MP3 format.  My main FLAC library of about 2100 albums takes 650 GB of storage space. The MP3 mirror, encoded with LAME at a quality level of -V2 takes just 150 GB of additional disk space.  I have a script that I've written to keep the MP3 library in sync, and run it each night, but you could also use dbpoweramp.

Then I use iTunes to load the iPods.  I don't use it for anything else.  One thing that I've found, if I want album art on the iPod then I have to embed it into the MP3 files instead of just having a cover.jpg in the album's folder, as I do with Squeezebox Server.

[mgalusha]

dbPoweramp will maintain all the artist/album/track info IF the original flac files are tagged properly. I just ran a test with 164 tracks from various folders from flac to mp3 and had no problems. But if the tags are not complete then it will not work out well.

dbPoweramp config I used:



resulting tree:

[JEaton]

I found out the hard way that the library file has to be updated by iTunes, you can't just put the files in the iTunes library and expect them to show up in iTunes.

I never really figured out how to have iTunes update its library and pick up new files and changes in tagging.  It can be done manually album by album, but it seems like an extremely tedious chore.

Someone in another forum turned me on to iTunes Library Updater, which has worked perfectly for me.  It's no longer being maintained, but to date (knock on wood) it still works with the latest version of iTunes.

http://itlu.ownz.ch/wordpress/

I run it from a batch file using the following command, where \\Audrey\F\mp3 is the location of the MP3 library:

Code: [Select]

:: Options:
::
::    /r      Do subdirectories.
::    /a      Add new media to iTunes database.
::    /t      Update iTunes track info from ID3 tags.
::    /c      Clean orphaned entries out of iTunes database
::    /x      Close iTunes after update.
::    /e:"<strings>"   File extensions, separated by spaces, e.g. ".mp3 .m4a .m4p".
::    /db:"<file>"     Location of iTunes database file.

"C:\Program Files\iTunes Library Updater\ITLUconsole.exe" /r /a /t /c /x /e:".mp3" /db:"C:\Documents and Settings\Jim\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music Library.xml" \\Audrey\F\mp3


[stereocilia]

dbPoweramp will maintain all the artist/album/track info IF the original flac files are tagged properly. I just ran a test with 164 tracks from various folders from flac to mp3 and had no problems. But if the tags are not complete then it will not work out well.

Good to hear; great post.  I was trying to go from apple lossless to flac, which worked in the test run of a few albums, but failed when I tried the whole library.  Maybe going from flac to apple lossless is more seamless in dBPoweramp.

[zybar]

I recently did what Mike described above and it mostly worked.

I did get a bunch of errors though and will need to spend time trying to figure out why.

George

[Mike Dzurko]

Great stuff! Thanks Mike G., will probably play with it this weekend. Still trying to decide which Ipod will be best for me. Leaning towards the latest Touch 32gig. I like the size of my wife's Nano for working out etc, but have a tough time reading the small screen, and don't want to mess with my cheater reading glasses all the time. Also like the idea of having wifi capability. I'm going to go look at the Touch today . . . any ideas, opinions welcome.

[Mike Dzurko]

I looks like Music Converter works fine, but wondering if there's a way to do batches? So far can only hand select the files in one folder, that will take a long time.

Looked briefly at Batch Converter but still unclear if this will output MP3s to a new folder while leaving the original FLACs intact . . .  Off to look at Ipods.

[ted_b]

DBPoweramp's Batch Converter is the greatest.  Just pick any number of folders or songs, pick a destination folder, and voila.  It does NOT delete the original set of files (that would be a bad design).  It can also filter format types just in case you have LAC among other formats and only want to convert FLAc (to say, MP3).  I've converted over 500 songs at a time, no problem.  You can even maintain same folder heirarchy if you want (I think that capability requires a Premium version).

[zybar]

DBPoweramp's Batch Converter is the greatest.  Just pick any number of folders or songs, pick a destination folder, and voila.  It does NOT delete the original set of files (that would be a bad design).  It can also filter format types just in case you have LAC among other formats and only want to convert FLAc (to say, MP3).  I've converted over 500 songs at a time, no problem.  You can even maintain same folder heirarchy if you want (I think that capability requires a Premium version).

I just converted over 60,000 songs from FLAC to mp3 using the Batch Converter tool and it worked very well.  No deletions and very few errors.

It took about a day and half, but now I have lots of music to play on my iPod during my travels and at work.   

George

[Mike Dzurko]

George, Ted, that is awesome news! I'm going to get playing with that soon. I'm pretty sure I have the premium version. Just got back with my new Touch 32gig, so I gotta get serious here

[mikel51]

Another option is to use JRiver Media Center.  I use this to rip FLAC files.  It also manages ipods.  It keeps a cache of mp3 files and synchs your ipod to the FLAC library that you use for your main audio library.  You can use the software to decide which music you want on your ipod and then synch.  My FLAC library has ~450 albums and the entire library at 320 mp3s is about 50 gigs--so I just let it synch all of my music to the 80 gig ipod--waiting for the 64 gig ipod touch so I can switch from the ipod video.

I haven't used DB Poweramp (which sounds like it might be the best ripper out there), but it also sounds like a great way to go.

I don't really use Media Center to play music any longer because I am using my modwright transporter, but I have left it in place to rip music and manage my ipod.

[srb]

--waiting for the 64 gig ipod touch so I can switch from the ipod video.

I'm waiting for the 128GB iPod Touch, so I'll have a substantially longer wait than you will.
 
Steve