Maintaining multiple file encodings in a MM library

[phantomwhale]

I am trying to do something with MediaMonkey that I've not seen any forum post directly address, although a large number are somewhat similar. So I thought I'd write this post as a place to dump my thoughts so far and see if any MM gurus can suggest other things to try.

My setup is this:
* All music on a large NAS drive, sorted into Lossless and Compressed folders.
* PC and Laptop both running MM 3.1 Gold, sharing the library (using Dropbox)
* A Squeezebox accessing the Lossless format files to play in my home hi-fi system.
* An iPod to sync up with an ever-changing subset of my Compressed format music and playlists.
* A Nokia phone to occasionally sync up with a small subset of my Compressed format music.

What I am trying to do is :
* Maintain 1 or more encodings of my music. Currently this is a Lossless encoding (FLAC) for every CD I own, as well as a Compressed encoding (M4A or MP3) of every CD I own, as well as other compressed tracks I've picked up along the way.
* Where I have a FLAC and M4A file (my chosen compression format when I am doing the compression) I am hoping to link the meta-data between them. E.g. I want them to share Album Art, Ratings, and all the other metadata tags. Ideally if they could share play count / last played too, that would be great.
* Be able to create playlists that can sync and play on my iPod (in Compressed format) as well as through MediaMonkey (in Lossless format) and export these playlists to M3U format (for the squeezebox), pointing at the Lossless format copies.

I have categorised these goals as follows:
(1) Make playing FLACs the default in MM - by hiding the M4As or through redirection
(2) Synchronise ratings between file formats. If I rate a song via Mediamonkey (FLAC or M4A) or on my iPod (for M4A) I want it reflected on both versions.
(3) Synchronise album art between albums. I prefer to store these outside of the actual files (e.g. using a "folder.jpg" file). I don't think FLAC allows an image tag anyway.
(4) Enable playlists to work with Mediamonkey, iPod and Squeezebox with minimal effort
(5) Allow simple and relatively fast synchronising of my music with removable devices (iPod, Nokia phone, etc)

I have ripped every CD I have into FLAC, and some into M4A already. Some M4As have ratings and album art already from previous efforts. Some FLACs do too, but not as many (I'd be willing to lose this if it saved time). So my next steps should be :
* Somehow "link" the M4A and FLAC albums where I have both
* Sort out synchronising the metadata from M4As -> FLACs (so I don't lose any M4A metadata in the next step)
* Do a batch convert of every FLAC album into M4A using DBPowerAmp
* "link" and synchronise metadata between every album for now and into the future

My attempts so far have taken me near mutliple libraries - but in the end I'm not sure that will help me too much, and I can use filters if I just want to view M4As (to build up iPod playlists) or FLACs (goal 1). Further browsing a year ago took me near the "Sync-the-Sync" plugin (http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... =2&t=29057) which was promising to help sync the metadata between FLAC and M4As. But then the author sadly decided to cancel and remove the plug-in. I respected his choice on this, but this didn't get me closer to my solution.

Now, after some reading around, I have started experimenting with the "Track Redirection" plugin today - which I see has just gone into v2.0 yesterday, and in doing so been renamed to "Track redirection and Synchronization" (http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... =2&t=39312) - ah ha, now here is something that might fit the bill ! Let's see...

GOAL 1
---------
With this plugin, I can select an album, select all the FLAC tracks, select "Create Redirections for selected tracks" and select "Create redirection links for tracks" and do this for "Unselected tracks in track list". This then links the FLACs and M4A files such that if I play the M4A track, it redirects and plays the FLAC track.
DONE

GOAL 2
----------
I can also use the plugin's "Options..." panel to enable synchronizing of all metadata tags between master and redirected files. Meaning if I rate songs anywhere, they are synched up.
DONE

GOAL 3
---------
Now album art is not stored inside metadata tags (for FLAC) - therefore the plugin does not seem to help here. Perhaps a manual script (to look for, and copy, folder.jpg files) is required. Or is there another mediamonkey plugin that might help here ?
NOT DONE

GOAL 4
---------
To be investigated. I suspect if I make M4A playlists, they will play as FLAC on Mediamonkey thanks to the plugin, sync with my iPod as M4A files, and when I export the playlists to M3U files for my Squeezebox it shouldn't be too much effort to batch edit the M3U file to replace \Compressed\ with \Lossless\ (and .m4a with .flac) which should create a valid FLAC playlist instead. Are there any plugins for handling playlist exporting ? Not really done much with this, so perhaps I'll learn more as I go.
NOT DONE

GOAL 5
---------
Allow synchronising of an ever-changing subset of my Compressed music with my Ipod, and occasionally Nokia Phone, without long synch times. E.g. the iPod auto-conversion functionality suggested below seems to require every song to be re-encoded every time is is added or re-added to a device.

Comments, suggestions and ideas really welcomed. I feel there is a real wealth of MM information out there that my forum searching has not uncovered yet, so would really appreciate any feedback here.

Many thanks,
Ben

[nohitter151]

Have you considered just converting the uncompressed tracks to m4a using auto-conversion with the iPod?

[phantomwhale]

Have you considered just converting the uncompressed tracks to m4a using auto-conversion with the iPod?

Interesting thought - I hadn't looked at that recently !

Quick experiment with it shows that it would achieve goal 1 (as I can remove the M4As from the library), goal 2 (modifyed iPod tune ratings get reflected back to the parent FLAC), goal 3 (the FLAC album art is copied into the tags of the converted M4As on iPod sync) and goal 4 (if I convert all my playlists to use FLACs, then this should work out).

Furthermore, if I play songs on the iPod, this is added to the play count of the FLAC files - when I do this using the Track Synchronisation script, it adds to the play count of the M4A file, which is not as good.

I can only see one thing that is going to make this less than ideal - the time to encode songs. My iPod is not large enough to contain all my music, and I often chop and change a dozen or so albums in and out to keep the music fresh. As far as I can tell, the auto-conversion does not cache the encoded songs anywhere, so every time I did this it would have to re-encode 100-150 songs... which takes quite a while (easily over 1 hour). I also occasionally move some tracks to my Nokia phone (when I want to travel super-light but want to take some music with me) - again, this would involve long encoding times every time and become quite tedious.

Looking around the posts, I see others have noted this, and requested the idea of a cache of these encoded songs (http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... =4&t=27879) - having a copy of these would reduce encoding to a one-off task, and would also be nice to have if I want to quickly grab an album onto my phone / USB stick as well.

So I guess iPod auto-conversion gets me 80-90% of where I want to be - thanks for the idea, it really does work better than I'd thought - but is there anyway to achieve this without the long encoding times every time I update removeable device's playlists ?

(I'll add that as a new goal to the initial post)

[sxr71]

For Goal 3 use AlbumArtTagger plug-in. It will find all the folder.jpg and embed them in the FLAC file tag. This is how I prefer it. Also this plug-in is capable of extracting from tags to folder.jpg or <artist>-<album>.jpg in another folder. If you use Squeezecenter this is how you can create an "Art" folder.

It's a powerful plug, just be careful with it in the beginning.