iPhone and Distributed Audio

I can only assume the bog down is related to itunes and PCs because don't matter what I throw at mine (though admittedly not 3TB, thats a lot of CDs you have purchased)

I absolutely love controlling Apple TV via Remote. Apple has really stumbled upon a fantastic solution for digital music, I hope they continue to support it.

same here Naijeru, I actually purchased a Touch just to use the remote after trying it with my girlfriend's iPhone. One of the best audio purchases I have made. One has to actually use it only once and is hooked, pics dont do it justice.

... and you can see the Naim forum in your hand in-between all the music fun !!

cheers

Garyi,

I have kept every single CD have ever purchased over the last 20 years... and yes they total over 2500 these days.

Plus all of my vinyl transfers in 24/96.

I haven't ever seen how many tracks there are but I am guessing it is well into the 30-50K range.

When I reached about 5000 tracks, it took about 5 minutes for WMP to simply open.

So i went to iTunes.... and used a super buggy FLAC plug-in until my Itunes version was obsoleted.

Things in iTunes were acceptable until I reached about 20K. Then serious problems.


I discussed with a Mac guru and he said he has to use separate playlists, and cannot put all of his music into one single playlist without problems.

He found results similar to mine.

BUT, if iTunes would natively support FLAC, i would find a way to get along with it.

Although I must admit I would only do so because of the ability to use my iPhone as a remote.

ITunes itself is chock full of all kinds detritus I would rather not have on my computer. Plus it is a resource hog.

I would agree that it would be beneficial for Apple to get itunes back to what it was designed for. There was talk of integrating iphone facilities and what have you into the new OS and thin itunes out, but this would leave a problem for PC users so unlikley to happen.

Santa's bringing me a nice iTouch for the same purpose - I was gobsmacked when I tried the remote function on my son's iPhone to control my iTunes. Didn't realise I can use it instead of my Blutooth keyboard so presumably I can use it to playback movies etc.?

The intention is to get a Mac Mini & NAS to stream tunes (currently residing on a PC)to my Lavry, but I'm sure I read somewhere that Apple are brining out a new Mini that's also the Apple TV - can't find any reference to this though.

Munch,

I did see that. I laughed my ass off. Great thread. I will be 35 in 3 days, so not feeling all that young... but the "award" certainly helps

Tony, garyi, munch etc...

At this point I am going to even consider using dbPoweramp to batch convert my library to WAV... I stress the word consider.

I really like having my entire musical world in one playlist. And I am not so sure iTunes could handle around 5TBs of WAVs.

Also, I am not seeing any way of ensuring a 24/96 output in iTunes.... it has changed considerably since I last used it.

When I bought my iPhone, I had to download it to sync with Outlook. Then I saw the remote app, then I played with the remote app... yummy.

I will need to buy 6TB NAS if I go this route, so I will do some listening tests and batch converting and make sure all of my carefully tagged songs stay as such.

Another roadblock is where to convert the WAVs to? I currently have a Artist>Album Folder>Tracks file structure I really like.

So if I batch convert, I believe my only choices are, 1) covert to same folder, or 2)convert to a different folder of my choice.

This means I loose my Artist folders. There are about 1500 so that would be fun to reconstruct.

If I convert to same folder, then I will have to manually delete all of the flacs. That surely isn't the route.

Some thought needs to be put into this.

Happy Holidays everyone!!!

Well at least the tagging is not a issue... at least when going to ALAC from FLAC.

I realized after my initial thoughts, that FLAC to WAV isn't going to work... no tags support. And there is NO WAY iTunes will find tags for most of my collection.

I thought maybe when converting from FLAC to ALAC... I thought it would convert to WAV first and lose the tags.

At least with dbPoweramp, all tags remain.

Yea I was gonna say WAV would not be a good idea.

I would really suggest you duplicate a portion of your music library and convert that first to see how you get on. And I would stress that lossless is lossless, so may as well convert through to apple lossless IMO.

quote:

Originally posted by garyi:
Yea I was gonna say WAV would not be a good idea.

I would really suggest you duplicate a portion of your music library and convert that first to see how you get on. And I would stress that lossless is lossless, so may as well convert through to apple lossless IMO.

Gary, there are many of us who would disagree with that statement. There are differences between the files. The question is whether one can hear the differences due to one's auditory sensitivity or if one has a system set-up and kit that can or can not reveal those differences. Of course even if one hears the differences each person needs to decide if they are significant enough to make any changes. They are however, present.

Well I am not really in the mood to argue over lossless files they are what they are, I would expect to ZIP up a word file and have it unzip with the same information.

So basically crack on me old son.

Just thought I would chip in and say how pleased I am with my iTouch. I use it for controlling my Squeezebox set up. There is now a native app you can download from the app store (iPeng) and its very nice indeed. Still pissed off about lack of FLAC support in iTunes although I understand you can get round this if you are running iTunes on a MAC.

Would be interested to hear what NAS solutions people are considering/using for such large collections and whether NAS also acts as music server.

Cheers

Jack

quote:

Originally posted by Jack:
although I understand you can get round this if you are running iTunes on a MAC.

And this work-around would be...????
I, and many of my iFriends, would love to know.

I am only aware of other players for Mac that can decode FLACs, scuch as Play or Cog, maybe Max.
Itunes? I want to hear more.

No idea if its any good but here is the link:

http://cubicfruit.com/fluke/

Fluke doesn't work.

If it did, it is for an old iTunes.

There are some other options as well. Most of them simply convert it to WAV, AND keep the FLAC to refer back for the tagging.

In effect they increase your storage space up to 5 times.... You might as well just convert to WAV and delete the FLACs....

Your best bet as I can see it is to batch convert FLAC to ALAC in dbPoweramp. But you will need to work in batches to avoid needing to temporarily double your drive space.

I am doing some testing... I'll chime in when I know more.

For those PC inclined and interested....

I have done some larger testing and have made more discoveries.

Batch converting to FLAC to ALAC.... Using dbPoweramp.


The Good:

- Tags are applied wonderfully. No apparent issues there.

- Can use iPhone and no other display for all controls (NOT VOLUME)... and very easily.

- 20,000 song playlist was fast and showed no lag. Although this is only about 40 times smaller than my complete library.


The Bad:

- Best to convert to same folder as FLAC. Otherwise you lose you folder structure. Then you must manually delete the FLACs.... or double your storage space.

- Album art.... iTunes found art for only about 1/2 of my music.


I know this will go against the grain but I still enjoy the Foobar interface much, much more.

But the iPhone remote app is too sweet to ignore.

Im still contemplating.....


Can anyone answer if it is possible to have iTunes simply look for the album art in the music folders?

I have art for EVERY album as "folder.jpg" in each respective album folder.

Can I have iTunes look for them rather than attempt to find them online.

There is NO WAY some of these will be able to be found. Out-of-print, ultra-rare, never released on CD vinyl scans, etc.....

-p

OK, itunes store hase in access of 8,000,000 tunes now, so its a good bet a fair amount of your collection has art work on itunes. You need to set up and itunes account. Yes its a way of dragging you in, but please understand you do not have to purchase anything.

Once done you can simply tell itunes to download art work.

For the rest of it, select the whole album you want to tag with your jpgs and ont he left hand side in itunes should be a square with an empty area, you drag the jpg into this area and it will tag the music with it. If you cannot see the square there is a little triangle thing bottom left to show it.

Another way is just google and drag the image onto it.

And if you use a mac, but do not assume only for mac there is plenty of apps that will search amazon for artwork as well, such as the excellent kavatunes.

I think personally this is just a small stumbling block which will not be a permanent issue for you. But it will require a little patience at the beginning. And as you are the type to experiement, do not delete them flacs if you can help it!

One other thing, if there is something you need to do regarding the audio files, itunes probably does it.

quote:

I have art for EVERY album as "folder.jpg" in each respective album folder.

With dBpoweramp you can insert a DSP effect 'ID Tag Processing' which has the option to import Folder.jpg into the ALAC files.

It is also possible to add the DSP effect 'Delete Source File' to remove the FLAC files.

quote:

Best to convert to same folder as FLAC. Otherwise you lose you folder structure.

You can convert them to a set path ie: C:\ALAC\ then set Dynamic Naming to '[origpath]\[origfilename]' to keep the folder structure within the new path set.

Garyi,

Thanks for the thoughts...

Firstly, I did "tell" iTunes to look for my album art. And it retrieved about 30%. And i do have an account.... I have an iPhone and you need an account to add applications.

I listen to some obscure music apparently.

Secondly, did I mention I have over 4000 albums to tag the art to??? I am NOT doing this manually. No way.

I have all of the art, for every album, every single one. Even inside, back covers etc.... Very carefully collected as I ripped. I dont need/want to re-download anything.

Thirdly, I dont use my Mac for listening. If I did I wouldn't have FLAC files in the first place.

Lastly, regarding your last comment, unfortunately it wont play or rip FLACS!!!!

Mr. Spoon,

Thanks for the tip.

Well one of those options might work... I tried the dynamic file naming method. It did not seem to recreate the folder structure exactly...

One example:
I have a folder named: "George Harrison"

Inside are individual folders for each album e.g.

"George Harrison - All Things Must Pass (1970) {VINYL 24/96} [FLAC]"

Inside are folders
- Side One
- Side Two
- Side Three etc....

Inside those folders are the tracks in FLAC.

Will it create a quadruple nested folder structure? If so I couldn't get it to work.

Basically my nomenclature is:

Artist > Album > Disc/Side Number > Tracks

Ill give it a shot tonight.... also, I realized I cannot, or better said will not, delete the FLACS. Backup, backup, backup....

So the only way to do this is to go out and buy 4TBs of drive space.

I suppose this is a question for an iTunes forum but Ill give it a shot here:

Can i simply ask iTunes to look in my music folders for the art rather than re-download it on iTunes, or manually apply it?

I have already done the manual method to get album art on the 20 album I through on my iPhone.

Of the 20 albums I converted to mp3 and imported in iTunes, it only retrieved 8 covers.

ONe thing you could try is putting a set of converted files plus the jpg in a folder then dragging the whole folder into itunes. I seem to remember itunes picking up the jpg as the album art.

Would still make your process a long one. The only other thing I can think of would be an automator action. But I don't know how to use automator.

quote:

Will it create a quadruple nested folder structure?

Yes it should do (double check the dynmaic option is selected which is below the output to folder), to save yourself the time to convert, click the 'List / Raname' button at the top, that will show where the files will end up.