Trying to manage 10K tracks

[5narky]

Hello, I just spent all my free time for two weeks trying to build metadata index and put 10K+ tracks (mostly from eMusic and similar sources) to my wife's iPod. She actually purchased it for video, but I stupidly insisted on 80G version to use it for our music.

I choose WinAmp Pro over iTunes, because iTunes looked more problematic in many aspects.

1 My biggest wish is WinAmp worked for this number af tracks. I decided to prepair 500-700 truck chunks at once, and sync them one after another. Past 8K tracks WinAmp started crushing while searching (towards the ens of this story it was crushing after few keystrokes, no matter what I was trying to search).

Next came crushing after syncing iPod. Out of curiosity I tried putting smaller chunks - this worked at first, and I managed to pack much more tracks than I tried at first to sync in one chunck unsuccessfully. However, around the number of 9250 I ended up not being able to send a single track any more. WinAmp would report 99% of the track accomplished, and died without leaving the track on iPod. Sure enough, I have rebooted everything and retried.

BTW my iPod still has 4G+ of free disk space, and there is no extra plugins. iPod as such seems to be fine. I can browse it externally and internally, and play every track, up to the very last synced.

Nonetheless, I'll try to reset iPod, and sync all 9250 tracks at once. But first I am going to wait for a few days to see if anybody is interested in my Windows diagnostics.

2 My second wish: make it faster. WinAmp is syncing several times slower than iTunes. It takes me approximately 10 minutes to send 1G via WinAmp, and I could not figure out why. I have Supermicro X6DAL-TB2 in this comp, and I was using primary USB port. I also tried it on Thinkpad T60.

3 To get my tracks ready for iPod I had to do lots of routine data processing work, like figuring out and filling incomplete tags, removing duplicates, etc. You know, you sent N tracks at once, iPod received K tracks less, and WinAmp would not tell you why.

My third wish is WinAmp to be more helpful on this. Just very simple things like the following.

- Don't ignore duplicates and other unacceptable tracks while syncing. Leave rejected tracks in queue with an appropriate status message. This alone would help a lot.

- Make Media Library remeber statuses of the browsers. If I go to iPod, I loose my place in Local Media. That's not right.

- Allow to reorder the lists around selected item. In other words, keep the list focused on the same item after reordering. For example: suppose I sorted tracks by their numbers in the albums. I immediately see some tracks have no nubmers. Now lets me reorder the list by albums, and check the other tracks from the same CD.

- Allow to export the list to simple single-line text file (tab separated). You can do everything with such files. I had to do such exportations through converting playlists. WinAmp is playlist-centric. It would not hurt if you make you librarian somewhat different from disc jockey.

Thank you very much for reading.

[5narky]

Two more suggestions. WinAmp hides many useful tags on iPod, like comment, date added/modified, etc. Syncing queue (Portables) is similarly limited.

[flocksoft]

give a try to the ml_ipod (freeware) with additional features over the standard pmp_ipod (comparation)

[5narky]

Originally posted by flocksoft
give a try to the ml_ipod (freeware) with additional features over the standard pmp_ipod (comparation)

Thank you very much, I looked at it briefly (just enough to understand this is an entirely different animal, and what the standard WinAmp implementation is based on some generalized model), but now I'll try it too.

However it's sad to see how much WinAmp developers disregard well established practices in their designs.