some newbie MC9 questions
Hi,
I tried iTunes and the skipping bug was too much, so I decided to give the MC9 trial a run while waiting for the bug fix from Apple. Here are a few questions:
1. What's this "dynamic playlists" feature in iTunes that everyone seems to be talking about? Does MC9 not have a feature to automatically update smart lists based on the rules used to define them?
2. My music collection is larger than my iPod. What's the recommended way to sync? For now I created a large playlist to sync with. But I can't figure out how to get the browser windows for genre/artist/album to appear when I'm viewing my playlist. Without them I find managing a large playlist like the one I'm syncing to rather cumbersome.
3. I can't figure out how to make MC9 automatically sync with the iPod.
4. How are ratings/playcounts, etc stored? If I need to reinstall or recreate my music database, will that information be lost? Are these fields viewable in iTunes if they're updated in MC9?
5. Are there plans for syncing the OTG playlist?
I think that covers it for now. My initial impression is that iTunes plays somewhat better with the iPod (which is not surprising since Apple seems unwilling to give information to 3rd party developers). The sync speed is phenomenal and syncing of OTG playlists is a nice touch, since the iPod refuses to keep that playlist between syncing sessions.
Other than that MC9 looks good. I particularly like that it's a Windows program not a Mac program masquerading as a Windows program. All the familiar right clicking and double clicking tricks works the way I expect. iTunes interface is clean, but everything is just a little different from how all the other Windows apps do it. I also like that MC9 puts filename as a viewable column. I don't need to be insulated from my OS.
Thanks,
Ric
[1932 byte] By [
iric] at [2007-11-9 14:58:37]
# 1 Re: some newbie MC9 questions
1. Smartlists in MC9 itself are dynamic--they update automatically. But they aren't dynamic once synched to the ipod--for example, if you have a smartlist with "rating=5", and on the ipod, change the rating to 4 on a song, the Itunes dynamic playlist would automatically remove it from the Ipod's playlist. It won't on an MC9 generated Ipod playlist (However, if you synch the ipod back to mc9, the playlist will be updated and the song removed; also, if you changed the rating in MC9, the playlist on MC9 would obviously be automatically updated). It would really come in handy on Last Played and Playcount smartlists, to have dynamic smartlists on the ipod...They are working on giving us this functionality--it's the only thing missing from MC9 at present.
2. I'll leave this one for Adam--he has a very elegant solution to the problem--in fact I think you'll get a better solution to this via MC9 than you will with Itunes--many more options.
3. MC9 doesn't autosynch, at least not yet--it might in the future. You have to pull up the synch screen to synch.
4. Playcounts and ratings are stored as tags. They won't be lost if you restore/recreate your database (you can even back them up in MC9 if you'd like). They should be read in Itunes, but I'm not sure on that one--I'll have to check--but they really should be.
5. Not that I know of. It's not a scenerio I see myself using, but I can understand why it would be to others.
Now that MC9 has AAC support, I think it's much better than Itunes. The synch speed of Itunes is a plus, and I doubt MC9 is going to get much faster, but it's fine for me as is. The dynamic playlist thing is a work in progress, and hopefully we'll have this soon. The OTG thing would be nice too, but not critical IMHO.
MC9 is MUCH more powerful application--you can do ALOT more with it. I don't like what Itunes does with my song files, and lack of features hurts too. I think Itunes is a much better program than mmjb, but going to Itunes from MC9 would, overall, represent a step backward for me.
dmt1 at 2007-11-15 17:19:58 >
# 2 Re: some newbie MC9 questions
I still don't grasp what the dynamic playlist does that a dynamically updated smartlist doesn't. In your example, as you said, once you sync the iPod to MC9 the new ratings and playlist will be updated on both MC9 and the iPod, no? Do you mean that in iTunes if the iPod is docked when you make a change in iTunes that it will be immediately changed on the iPod, therefore not requiring you to sync before unplugging the iPod? I guess that makes sense and is useful if that's the case.
However, my brief experience with iTunes seemed to suggest that changes in iTunes are not immediately reflected on the iPod. It did look like they were periodically updated but minutes after the change, so my feeling was that if you wanted to make sure the iPod was up to date you'd want to sync it before unmounting it anyway. In iTunes syncing is so fast it's not that big a deal to sync before dismounting, whereas in MC9 it does take a couple of minutes to sync.
I do hope they impliment OTG playlist syncing and AAC encoding in MC9. If they did it would pretty much do everything iTunes does.
Ric
iric at 2007-11-15 17:21:04 >
# 3 Re: some newbie MC9 questions
My suspicion is AAC coding is around the corner. I have no idea about OTG.
The dynamic playlist is SUPPOSED to update instantaneously on the ipod--maybe they don't work as well as advertised. But, say you've got your ipod in Timbuktu, and don't have access to a computer. And you've got a playlist, rating of 5. You play a song from it, and change the rating to 4--in a dynamic playlist, it would automatically and immediately come off the list. And if you changed a song from 4 to 5, it would automatically come on the playlist, no synching required.
It would come in handy for last played or playcount smartlists--you could guarantee yourself fresh music for extended periods of time, with no repeats, without having to synch.
dmt1 at 2007-11-15 17:22:03 >
