I've been considering using mp3tofid for a while to make syncing my empeg easier when I fix up tags or add a bunch of music (which I've done recently). After a small case of dependency hell, I now have mp3tofid v4.03 compiling and running happily on my MythTV machine.

On my PC my MP3s are organised as


I also have a couple of "special" top level directories called "Comedy", "Various", "Soundtracks", "New Uploads", "Language", "Singles" and "Audio Books" for generally non music tracks. With jemplode I've ordered things such that these special ones are at the end and "A" to "Z" are uninterrupted.

The issues I see with mp3tofid:

1) I can't order those special directories to the end, regardless of what I do. I can run jemplode afterwards but any resync with mp3tofid will reverse that immediately. This not a big issue but will be annoying. I could create another playlist in the top I guess and put everything in there.

2) I have a custom shuffle that puts all my marked tracks in a random order at the beginning followed by the rest of the tracks (shuffle0=Marked,marked=32768,random=1 in config.ini). This alls a favourite random on any playlist. If I use mp3tofid I'll lose all my marked files which I'd really prefer not to. Has anyone considered some method to prevent losing marked status and play counts? Very difficult with the fids changing. In fact if I don't clear the dynamic data after the mp3tofid sync random other tracks will get marked. I was thinking some kind of logic to get the marked tracks from a jemplode export and then creating a script or similar to "remark" the appropriate FIDs back on the empeg.

3) My MP3s are currently stored on a windows XP machine (i.e. NTFS). The inodes "created" by the samba share will change upon rebooting/remounting this share resulting in mp3tofid getting confused. I can understand that and can move the MP3s to a linux machine I guess. It will make tagging etc slower though since it's on the other end of a wireless link. Just annoying.

4) If I ever re-create the filesystem on the PC (upgrade machine etc), I'll lose all the inodes and any marked tracks I've created (or kept intact subject if 2 is at all solvable) will be lost again. At the very least I'd have to resync everything again.

5) My "New Uploads" playlist consists of links/shortcuts to newly added music to put it in easy reach. I create these in jemplode now using the Deep Paste function for new albums I've loaded. I could use something like ctime but then the album would be out of order. How can I recreate these links from a Windows machine accessing a samba share for mp3tofid to follow.

Anyone have any suggestions or input to get around my "issues"? Should I just stick with jemplode?

Thanks

I've been contemplating moving to mp3tofid as well and would like to reiterate issue #1. I sort my playlists "manually" such that they come out in this order:

• The Mothers of Invention
• Queens of the Stone Age
• Frank Zappa

I do this by editing the Artist field for the playlists and put in alpha-sorted versions of the artist names:

• Mothers of Invention, The
• Queens of the Stone Age
• Zappa, Frank

Then sort by the artist field and mark that as the order. I have to turn off autosorting on the empeg, too.

This is a reasonably tidy way to do it, but I'm not married to it, so if there's a different way to make it work using mp3tofid, I'd love to hear it.

A possible solution to this would be to simply rename the files with this new Artist wouldn't it? mp3tofid should then sort appropriately I think. Or do you not want to do that?

Also: whilst your issue with Frank Zappa wouldn't be solved, jemplode/emplode should already do what you what you want and sort excluding "The" and "A" etc. There is an option for "intelligent" sort in mp3tofid which probably does that for you.

Well, I'd rather the playlist appear on the empeg's UI as "Frank Zappa" but be sorted as if it were "Zappa, Frank". If there's some way to get mp3tofid to do that, I'd like to know. I can probably hack something up, but I'd rather not.

If you used a directory for the artist (like me), then changing the directory name should be enough, shouldn't it? The MP3s would remain untouched but the playlist would should up as "Zappa, Frank" although I think that's what you'd have now.

It would make it difficult to restructure automatically based on ID3 tag. You could use one of the unused ID3 fields for to keep the artist field used for sorting.

Nope. Shows up as "Frank Zappa", but it's sorted in the 'Z's.

Ah OK. The Playlist is still called "Frank Zappa" but the artist of the playlist is "Zappa, Frank" which as far as I am aware is not used anywhere. Most of mine are either "Various" or simply blank (probably emplode vs jemplode). That would have to be a custom edit for each new artist once the tracks are dropped into (j)emplode though right?

In that case that would be another issue I hadn't listed. I don't have that issue and accept the fact that "Frank Zappa" would come under "F". In my case however I could at least put it in the "Z" folder/playlist if I'd wanted to. I do that with my "The" and "A" artists and then sort in jemplode which is smart with those prefixes.

Hmmm... I really don't know that it's worth it to be honest... I'm more concerned about the marked tracks personally and I think I could modify mp3tofid to ignore inodes and just use the path in the master on the PC. That would break things if files were ever renamed or moved, but I can accept that.

Right. I'm just using it as a field to store that value to make it easy to sort.