Sansa / Playcount / Ratings / Mediamonkey???

[sun]

Hi there!

I´m new to Rockbox and think this project is just fantastic...

So I´m thinking about switching from my Trekstor Vibez to a Sansa with Rockbox.

Newbie question:
Once that USB-Connection works on the Sansa will I be able to sync my playcounts/ratings back to the PC?
I assume that Rockbox has the same functionality on different devices, so I think if someone with a different player i.e. Iaudio, Ipod can do this now I will be able to do this for sure in the near future with the Sansa?!

Thanks a lot for your help!!!  

[GodEater]

Someone would have to write a PC side application in order to sync that information.

The database on the player that Rockbox maintains has that information in it - but I know of no PC applications which know how to import it.

[sun]

Really?

If this is the case I don´t understand it.
I mean, what if the device is broken/stolen or you switch to another device: Then all your playcounts and ratings are gone forever?

And if I hear 50% music on the PC and 50% on the portable device, there HAS to be the need and a way to synchronize the data...

Is there really no application that can read out and process the Rockbox DB?

Anyone?  

[Llorean]

As was said, contact the application writers. Rockbox is a firmware project, go post a feature request to Seamonkey to add support for the Rockbox database, for example.

[elborak]

It sounds like all you really want is to be able to backup your data files to your PC. If so, there are literally dozens of applications available to do directory/file backups.

[GodEater]

Not really - he wants the metadata that goes with his file - and that's only stored in the rockbox database.

Sure - he could back the files up which contain the database - but it's not much good to him on his PC for keeping track of what he's listened to unless he has an application which understands the file format.

[elborak]

Agreed, but he was talking about switching to another device. In that case a raw backup of the database files is sufficient.

[GodEater]

And if I hear 50% music on the PC and 50% on the portable device, there HAS to be the need and a way to synchronize the data...

But he also wants to sync his playcounts and rating between his device and his PC. So simply backing up will gain him nothing in that direction.

[polygonal]

You can probably achieve this by using a decent tagging software that can import text file to tag. From all the tagging softwares I know (which is not much, by the way ;-), MP3TAG can do it. You can export the database changelog and then have the data there write into your file. And for the rockbox side, there is a patch out there that read the rating tag and display that instead of the database rating.

It's rather cumbersome, but at least it is one way to do what you want instead of begging someone to understand how rockbox tagcache works and write a program for that.

[dcr693]

sun, this probably won't help you out, but I thought I'd mention my own system for working with playcounts. I've never attempted to deal with ratings and my system wouldn't work with it anyway.

I use MediaMonkey 2.x which stores data in an mdb file. The file type is used by MS Access as well as VB. I use Rockbox with the LastFM log feature to log when songs are played. I then take the scrobbler.log file (it's in txt format) and import it into Access. At that point, it's really easy to use an update query to update playcounts.

Other than the fact that this does not do anything for ratings, you probably won't want to use this system. First, MediaMonkey 3 beta 2 is out and it uses a different db format, based on mySQL. I searched (but not too hard) for an easy to use front end to it, but couldn't find one. Two, to easily use this method, you'd need MS Access though you could use VB for it also.

[GodEater]

You could still use Access as the front end to a MySQL database, you just connect your .mdb file to it over ODBC. It's pretty trivial.

[dcr693]

You could still use Access as the front end to a MySQL database, you just connect your .mdb file to it over ODBC. It's pretty trivial.

Cool. Yeah, I did a Google and found these ODBC downloads for mySQL: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/3.51.html. I didn't look too hard at first because I planned to keep using version 2.x as long as possible because I finally have my system working the way I want. Good to know it's out there though.

[Hulo]

Someone would have to write a PC side application in order to sync that information.

And this application exists already.
SansaMonkey

[onkel_enno]

Thanks Hulo, for the link to the application  

If there are still feature requests for SansaMonkey, let me know, over in the MediaMonkey Thread.

BTW @GodEater + dcr693
What do you want with MySQL? Because of MediaMonkey 3? MM3 uses SQLite und it's not easy to access it like it was with MM2  

[GodEater]

If there are ODBC drivers for SQLLite you should still be able to use MS Access as the front end.