I'm curious about how others manage largish collections of music, and synchronizing to various devices. I have 550 CDs or so in my collection, all nicely ripped and encoded with lame at 256 kbps CBR. It adds up to 6400 tracks or so, and just shy of 60GB total.

Loading music on my empegs is trivial. I have four empegs in active use, and they each contain my full collection. I'm just about out of free space, so I'll have to decide how I want to proceed from here, but I will probably bite the bullet and buy more drive space soon.

The nice thing about this arrangement is that I don't have to think about how to load music. I have everything tagged the way I want it, and stored in Artist/Album/Song hierarchy (where that makes sense). I drag my root music folder onto the Playlists tab in Emplode, let it sync, and I'm 98% done. The remaining 2% of the work involves a few custom playlists, the occasional "Ignore as child" setting, etc. No big deal.

Now, I bought a Karma for my SO for Christmas. Being a 20GB unit, it will only hold about a third of our music. I was excited to see the Synchronization Profile feature in RMM when I loaded the software, thinking it would help me pick out which parts of my collection should be loaded on the Karma. However, I don't think it's really meant for that, at least not on a granular level. I think you can pick a single criterium (a single artist, genre, or year, for instance) to define a profile, but I was expecting to be able to do a bit more boolean arithmetic with many criteria combined. Did I just miss that feature, or is it really missing?

To get music loaded on the Karma, I sat the SO down in front of RMM, and had him scroll through the list of albums, control-clicking those that he wanted to load. Talk about a pain -- he's not terribly computer-savvy, and as he's scrolling through this list of 550 albums, one mistake (like letting up on the control key slightly while clicking, or trying to use the arrows to scroll the screen) blew away all the selections he had made. I think it took the better part of 10 tries over the course of an hour before he got it right (cursing the whole time). I suppose it would have been better to pick things out and sync in smaller chunks, but he wanted to pick the whole list, and get it tweaked just right with all of his favorites, before loading anything.

Now, after using the Karma for a few weeks (and he loves it, BTW), he wants to change some of the music he has loaded (getting rid of some, loading some others). I am probably going to have to go back into RMM, and help him figure out how to ditch what he doesn't want, and load the new stuff. It's all very manual, where Emplode is nicely automated (drag that root folder onto "Playlists", and it syncs only the new music).

Unless I'm not understanding how to use it properly, it seems to me that the interface in RMM is not well-suited to selecting a subset of music from a large collection. So, some random thoughts on how this might be improved:

- Allow syncronization profiles to consist of many criteria. It would be easy for him to list the artists/albums he doesn't want to load, and have the rest be sync'd automatically. Using specific criteria to filter out what he doesn't want loaded would make it easier in the long run to sync up new music as it arrives.

- The UI for selecting music in the Album view is painful on long lists. I know that's just the windows UI at work, but I'd love to have an option to switch the selection mode to turn a mouse click (or the spacebar) into a toggle selection, without using the control key.

- Improve the way albums are displayed in the Album view. If I have albums titled "Greatest Hits" from two different artists, I'd like to see two line items in the Album view (as opposed to having RMM display a single Greatest Hits album, by "Various Artists").

I'd love to hear how other people solve this problem (I can't be the only one, right?), or if there are ways that I can use the existing featureset more effectively.

Thanks,
--Dan.

one mistake (like letting up on the control key slightly while clicking, or trying to use the arrows to scroll the screen) blew away all the selections he had made.

Something to understand about RMM... You don't have to do everything all in one go. You can start synching just one album, and then continue on down the list without interruption. The synching happens in the background so there's no need to do the big Ctrl-Click on the list trick.

Interestingly, it handles deletions smartly, too. For example, if it's still synching and hasn't gotten to a certain album yet, and you select the Karma and then select that album on the Karma and say "Delete", it'll show up in the detail list as "Cancelled" and it just won't bother to transfer that file. If you run out of space on the Karma and the synch stalls, you can select the Karma and begin deleting albums, and it'll delete them and then pick up the synch where it left off.

I understand your issue with having more music than will fit on the Karma. So I handle it a bit differently. I select the entire music folder and synch it to the Karma, so the percentage bar at the bottom indicates "red" at the end. Then, as it's still in the middle of synching the music, I select the Karma and start fishing through and deleting stuff I don't care so much about until the bar isn't red any more. I don't think this was their intended way for me to do this, but it works.

Another option is to use the synch profile feature that has it replacing the contents of the player based on stuff you've listened to recently. It'll delete stuff off the player that you've recently listened to, and replace it with stuff from your PC that you haven't heard in a while.