How quiet is a mini mac?

ferenc

I see you are using itunes and a mac to great effect.

I have one question. Other than plug in an optical cable is there anything else I need to do regarding the setting up of my mac?

Cheers

Eric

Not really. If you want you can play with audio midi settings. To my ears no change.

Just set it at 24 bit output (and whatever sample rate you are listening to - ie 44.1 CD). If you change Audio Midi settings then you need to restart iTunes.

James

So do you have to change the output everything you change from 44.1/16 to 96/24?

Ferenc,

I really appreciate you testing this out for me. I will give it another shot.

I do not use embedded art but my covers or "folder.jpgs" are sometimes a couple MBs... Many are scans I did when not finding suitable art online. Some of those are huge.

Perhaps this is the issue? But i didnt think iTunes used my folder.jpgs??? I though it went online and found its own art. I thought this because ALL of my folders have a "folder.jpg" for the cover. When I imported all of the converted ALACs there was no art until I asked iTunes to get it for me. IT returned art on about 50% of the music. Anything obscure was missing. It took hours for it to look through everything.

That was issue #1.

Then it would constantly say it was checking gap detection or something (in the little window up top) and slowly work its way through the library.

Then everytime I opened up iTunes, it would take about 5 minutes to be ready to play. It was slow, sluggish and basically unusable. So I stopped trying.

But if i can get it to work as you have seemed to, I would seriously, really seriously consider moving to iTunes for a while and see how I get used to it.


Was iTunes perhaps embedding the art into every ALAC?

Is there a resource for setting up iTunes correctly for "our" uses.?

Can I disable all of the online what-not such as Stores and it checking tags and art etc???

One time in using iTunes it retagged all of my music without me prompting it. I looked in my current iTunes last night (on my PC) but didnt see the setting.

All help is truly appreciated.

thanks again,
Patrick

PC, I would start building the library gradually from scratch and see where the problem first appears. Would not take more than a day's work.

QTT,

I did start slowly, by converting big batches, 100GB or so, to ALAC then importing into iTunes.

What do you mean by "from scratch", what other way is there?

At around 40,000 tracks things took a bad turn.

I will give it another shot.

Is there a way for itunes to simply use the folder.jpgs i have in EVERY album folder?

Is it possible to sort the library and playlist by "Directory Structure" not by artist etc???

thanks again
-p

quote:

Originally posted by pcstockton:
Is there a way for itunes to simply use the folder.jpgs i have in EVERY album folder?
Is it possible to sort the library and playlist by "Directory Structure" not by artist etc???

1. To add the artwork manually, I usually select the whole album or individual song and then right click, select Get Info, either go to Artwork tab or double click the Artwork box (if group is selected), it then will give you a choice to select a jpg file as an artwork.
2. As far as I know, it is not possible.

Ferenc and QTT,

I have just started playing around a little.

I now realized a few things I could not get along with that made me eschew iTunes as an option.

Firstly, the art issue. it doesn't even come close to finding art for even half of my shite. Admittedly some is farily obscure.

Secondly, the "random" or "shuffle" on iTunes is horrible. It simply takes the playlist and shuffles it, then plays it in order, e.g. after "Immigrant Song" it always plays "Ten Years".

I think you can force it to re-order the "shuffled list" somehow without restarting iTunes, but cannot remember.

I would like, need, true random. Every single song has equal odds of showing up next. Foobar's random for example only prevents the same song from being played twice in a row.
FYI, Foobar has random and shuffle. Shuffle works as iTunes does.

Thirdly, I cant sort by directory structure... Meaning, inside a folder called "Funkadelic-Parliament" I have all of my albums by both bands. But i want them to show up next to each other in a playlist.
In foobar I sort the playlist (my entire archive) exactly as my folder structure is on my hard drives.

Anyway.... if these issues are surmountable i would use it now.

thanks,
P

PC, I see what you mean. Well, you win some you lose some.

Actually, all these limitations that you mention do not really bother me at all because:

1. My library is small enough so that I can sort out lots of artworks manually without any big hassle.
2. I usually listen to my music throughout a whole album and rarely use shuffle. I have this habit probably because I listen to my LP12 a lot.
3. I usually sort my music by date added or artists so I do not really care about the actual folder structures.

Why is a folder a couple of meg in size?

This will be your issue, I am willing to bet.

Know this about itunes, its a bit weighty with all that applestore crap but its quick. If you are having issues its localised not general.

As an experiment select ten albums. USe these couple meg folders for the first run and see how it behaves then start a new library in simple folders.

ONe other thing and sadly I only know of it for mac, but kava tunes for mac can create customer folder icons if thats your bag using the album art for the folder icon, however I believe it uses the OSes icon tech to make a simple icon as opposed to something weighing a meg or more (baring in mind on my system for instance album art is less than 300K usually)

quote:

44.1/16 to 96/24?

quote:

So do you have to change the output everything you change from 44.1/16 to 96/24?

Yep - bit of a PIA. But i dont have a lot of 24/96 so not a concern at the mo.

Gary,

I suppose I should elaborate. In side each Album Folder is a single jpg of the cover art. I happened to name them all exactly "folder.jpg" I could have called them cover.jpg, or art.jpg. But started with "folder" a long time ago and stayed with it.

Foobar looks specifically for this first for "Cover Art", any other jpgs in the folder are ignored unless there is no "folder.jpg"

I dont have folder "icons" and dont care to. I only want a picture of the album cover to show when a song is playing. Standard fare.

Most of my art is 300x300 to 500x500. Although many go up to 2000x2000 (my scans). Of course these are bigger and can approach 3MB. Why? Because I scanned the cover myself and didnt shrink them down.

Anyway, not sure what you mean by folder icons. I dont think I use them. Also, iTunes IS NOT using my folder.jpgs for art or I would have art on everything in the iTunes playlist, which I do not.

I highlighted everything and told it to get art and it returned about half.

Is there a way to make iTunes use the jpgs I have in my album folders? There must be or you wouldn't be telling me there are options.

thanks again guys and gals!
Patrick

Hi Patrick. I understand what you are doing. I do the same for films for XBMC whereby it will default to folder.jpg for cover art.

In which case I would be surprised if this was the issue. I have no idea how itunes does its thing for album artwork. I have no idea where it stores it even. I do know that downloaded artwork from itunes is stored in a database folder within itunes but artwork I have dragged onto albums, I have no idea where that lands up. As I understand it itunes adds it to the first tune of an album then uses database code to make the other tunes show the artwork, thereby avoiding many duplicates.

I would say at a guess 2 thirds of my music is self 'tagged' with arteork (whereby I drag google found art into itunes) and the other third is from itunes.

Again start up time is in around two bounces.

The library you are trying to load is it all standard stuff or weird and wonderful rips you tend to keep on about?

Firstly, thanks again for helping me try AGAIN to use iTunes. I want it to work.

Secondly..... Mostly weird and wonderful...

Just now a few that it cannot find are:

Trevor Dunn's Trio Convulsant - Debutantes and Centipedes
Zu - The Way of the Animal
Kaada and Patton (Mike Patton) - Romances
Mike Patton - Collected Psyche II
Tortoise - A Digest Compendium
etc....

I copy and pasted the art I do have into one of them iTunes couldn't find art for. It worked, but I wonder the same thing you are.... where did it go? how does it work? Did it just embed the art into the song? If the latter, thats no good. It increases every file size as they now individually include the art with the song.

It must put the art somewhere, if not embedding, or there must be an HDX-like, metadata file or something it refers to to be able to use it. iTunes surely didn't "add" anything to the folders I have my music in.

Also, for what it is worth, i am not having iTunes copy anything to the "iTunes Library" as then I would have two copies of everything correct?

Does this affect how my iTunes performs?


So is there a way for iTunes to scan my folders to find the art it cannot find elsewhere?

Also, do you have any clue how big the art is when iTunes goes and finds it itself?

thanks again all.

-patrick

500x500 I believe.

As for not adding to itunes, this should not mae a difference, In essence itunes creates a database which sits in the itunes folder, pointing at all your music files. So technically it matters not where they are stored as in the frst instance itunes looks to its database, if it consequently cannot find the actual file it will throw up a little exlamation mark.

Long and short is I think a bit of googling is in order. IMO provided itunes recognises the music it should not be a problem.
That being said I did convert all my music from lossless to original AIFF files and this caused Appletv to have a spasm which would take literally ten minutes to load the library. It did not effect itunes itself however. But if you are streaming the music, i.e. the actul music is on a nas and its all totally uncompressed, perhaps this is killing itunes?

The album art is normally held in the individual album folders, alongside (but not part of) the individual track files. The picture files that itunes gets from the internet are tiny, around 10kb (large) and 3kb (small).

I doubt iTunes could recognise jpegs as relating to albums on your hard-drives, so no, iTunes can't find missing art on your system automatically. The internet databases have the cover pictures somehow associated (not always accurately) with the album ID.

Yes, if you have iTunes "copy music to your iTunes folder" it will double everything up if it wasn't ripped to that folder to begin with. Beware of this options as well as the "keep my music folder organised" option. With large collections, this can lead to your computer automatically moving huge amounts of data around.

It is difficult to get iTunes to seamlessly use a NAS as the default location for your music. It won't "stick" - if iTunes can't find the drive it will flip back to your local drive and default iTunes folder. This is a pain. You don't need to re-associate the library and preferred music location for playback, but any new rips will annoyingly be placed in the local folder unless you notice that it has defaulted and you manually switch it back first.

Winky,

I dont have any missing art. It is all right there in the folders iTunes scans to find the music?

Don't most people out there have a jpg in their album folders?

It seems strange that iTunes is the only player that doesn't make use of the art you ALREADY have. Why download other art when you have perfect art right next to the other files iTunes is "scanning".

Especially frsutrating when I have gone through the effort of scanning covers that are different than what a generic online search would find, DCC, MFSL, alternative covers etc...

But thanks for the help, I will see what I can find out about using my own art.

-Patrick

quote:

Originally posted by james n:

quote:

44.1/16 to 96/24?

quote:

So do you have to change the output everything you change from 44.1/16 to 96/24?

Yep - bit of a PIA. But i dont have a lot of 24/96 so not a concern at the mo.

Thats not cool - I think I may give up trying to use a PC or Mac as a server - there just isn't a good solution yet.

I am currently running:
PC with Foobar & FLAC, iphone with Plugplayer. It's not bad but PlugPlayer is sluggish.

Mac, itunes and apple lossless, iphone with iRemote. Works very well indeed, until you want to play 96/24 which involves setting changes.

Sonos and FLAC, iphone with Sonos Remote. Works very well but no high rez support.

I think I will save up for a Sneaky DS and use it as a transport. With Songbird on the iphone which works really quite well.

I don't need anything trick like huge play lists etc. I only ever play 1 album at a time.

btw neither the PC or MAC sound as good as the Sonos with their built in soundcards, so anyone using theirs may want to consider a better way of extracting the digital output.

Try the Sonic Studio 'amara' software that has auto sensing of sample rates, you don't have to switch off itunes when you change, they are sending out some fre demo software at the moment.

Have you seen the price of Amara i think i'll stick to manual sample rate changing

The demo is free!

Occean,

You must try using a very simple Http Controller in Foobar and use Safari on your iPhone.

I bought plugplayer as well and went instantly, i mean in 30 seconds, back to the Http Controller.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/f...8937&showtopic=62218

Download the component into your Components Folder.

Go into settings and specify the port you want to use. (default is 8888)

In your safari browser you simply go to http://192.168.1.yourcomputer:8888

A few people have wrote some "skins" for it that perfectly format it for an iPhone screen. I am working on one now in fact, very easy.

I use one like this:


It is as fast as the itunes remote app.

I love it.

If you cant get along with Foobar, EAC, an Iphone controller and a PC, you will HATE dealing with a Mac solution.

Id be happy to help get you dialed in.

-patrick

Dear Patrick,

Do I see you are listening to "Disturbed?"

That is a little heavy for me!

ATB from Goerge