Error while synching with MC9 and 30gig Ipod
I just got my ipod and heard that MM was pretty bad, so I didn't install it. Rather, I installed MC9, whose tag options are very cool, but have forced me to do a lot of work on my rather large collection. However, I have been having problems synching. The synch speed seems fine (15~ mb/s) but MC9 seems to only do one synch on a fresh ipod, otherwise I have to restore the ipod so I can upload things. This, as you may well understand, is very bothersome. The error comes up everytime I right click on the ipod from the system tree called 'CD, DVD, and Handhelds'. I have gone through the MC Faq I found (the one hosted on earthlink and recommended by J River) but have not figured out why this is happening.
Ok, on to the real error info.
It happens in two different ways (but always crashes the mc program)
1) I will select the drive (no double clicking, right clicking, etc) and it will pop up with a useless error message that shows a read circle with an 'X' in it and the title reading 'hh_portable' and right after I click ok it crashes.
2) Sometimes it won't crash right away, and when I right click the drive it will read 'cannot connect to ipo' or something to that effect (I haven't been able to get to crash 2 lately)
I don't know if this was enough information. Thanks in advance for the help.
[Edit]: Just so you know, I have version 9.0 (I thought would be most stable). Would it be a good idea to try a beta release?
# 1 Re: Error while synching with MC9 and 30gig Ipod
Welcome to the 'lounge dewey! ;)
First off, try this to make sure we don't have anything going on weird in the background:
Click on File>Library>Update Library. Make sure the checkbox "delete media which does not exist" is checked. This won't delete any songs or anything, just clean up the MC9 database in case anything was moved.
Then try again.
BTW, what type of firewire card do you have? It could be that there are connection issues between the iPod and your firewire card. MC9 is very stable in transferring.
I wouldn't use the beta yet since you're new to the app. While there are not many bugs, there are daily rebuilds and that can get tedious unless you're into it. And somedays things get broken.
Adam
# 2 Re: Error while synching with MC9 and 30gig Ipod
Thanks for the warm welcome and I'm sorry, but I forgot to say that I was using the ipod with a USB 2.0 connector (with the correct USB drivers from my motherboard manufacturer).
I got a little impatient and got the beta (9.1.202) before someone replied. I caught on quick and was fixing up messy tags in no time with some of the more wizbang features. The ipod works now (with no errors and very well in fact!) but there are some synchronization 'bugs' still, they, however, do not interfere with my actual ability to use the ipod or the program.
To elaborate, I do the synchronize option and it works, but there seems to be a trade off between my having custom playlists (what MC9 sees as .m3u's) or having the artists (only the artists lists, not the albums or genre) list on the ipod database. I hope I explained that well. To explain further, after ever synch the ipod will have its playlists, but the artists list will not work. To remedy this I started doing the rebuild database (from right clicking on the ipod drive) and that seems to work well, but this removes the playlists and is tiresome.
I don't know if this is related or not, but I also get duplicated listings (I don't know if it's the files being duplicated or not) but they clutters up my Albums and Artists horribly.
As usual, I hope you can understand all that! Your tip for cleaning out the library of 'dead' files was very useful, it cleaned up my database a good deal (after all the shuffling I had done).
# 3 Re: Error while synching with MC9 and 30gig Ipod
Ah, well first off there was a BIG bug in .202. Make sure you get the latest version each day. In .202 Artist information wasn't getting copied to the iPod. So, get .203 (or .204 if that's out yet) and do another sync. No need to reformat or restore, just do a normal sync. It'll fix it.
Regarding your playlists. If you can, it's better (IMO) to make your playlists natively in MC9, don't import external ones. Just makes things cleaner in MC9. I understand that you might have a bunch of your favorites that you imported, but you might at some time want to recopy them as native playlists in MC9. Just a thought.
Or convert them to Smartlists! :) There is a bug that's going to be fixed in Smartlists today (just so you know).
Adam
