iPod Classic Album Art

[Dukedudez]

Wow!!!  I just installed Rockbox on my iPod Classic 6th gen. 80gb and i'm excited to customize my iPod.  I have a question though:

I know I can add music to Rockbox by dropping and dragging, but is there any way I can drag all the music from my iTunes library and have it set up into folders by artist and album?  It's kind of hard to explain, but I'll give an example.  Let's say I drag an album by Bon Iver into the "Music" folder I created in my iPod.  Once I drag it there I see multiple mp3 files that just stay in the "Music" folder.  However, I want it to be organized by artist (Bon Iver) and then album (For Emma, Forever Ago) and then in the album folder I want the mp3s to be there.  I would do this myself, but it would literally take forever because I have well over 30gb of music.

Thanks!

Update:  Ok, so I just added a couple of mp3s and I noticed that the database organizes them by artist and album!  That's awesome!!   However, can I still get them to be organized under files, or is it no big deal.

Update 2:  So I can't see any album art from the songs I dragged from iTunes to my iPod even though I can see the album art in iTunes.  What's up with this?

[saratoga]

You'll probably have to embed the album art in the file tags if you're just going to throw all the files into one folder.  Alternatively you can organize your music into folders for each album and put a folder.jpg in each folder.

[Dukedudez]

Is there a quick way to do that?  I have over 4,000 songs and I feel it would take forever by myself.

[[Saint]]

There are indeed quick ways to do that, but depending on how good your metadata is for each file it may have quite some difficulty in doing so.
Auto-taggers aren't really designed to cope with "one big lump of files in the same folder".

Some suggestions are Musicbrainz Picard or Mp3Tag, both can do what you want but may or may not have a very hard time doing so if your music isn't organised in a sane way.

If the idea of using Rockbox was to get away from iTunes, even though it might seem like a daunting task you might want to look into re-ripping your music and organising it in a sane "Music - Artist - Album - File" way to make life easier for yourself. iTunes obfuscates the tracks filenames and organises them into their own terrible scheme that is pretty much impossible to navigate with the Filebrowser.


[St.]

[Dukedudez]

Okay, so I used Mediamonkey to transfer my music to my Rockboxed iPod.  I used Mediamonkey because it was easy to update tags and album art and I've heard good reviews about it.  So I loaded my music on it and now it's super weird.  There's now a folder called iPod_control on it and the database shows nothing like artist or album.  And still no album art!!  I even updated pretty much every file with album art using Mediamonkey.  What's going on?

[saratoga]

There's now a folder called iPod_control on it and the database shows nothing like artist or album. 

MM is just updating the Apple OS database.  Thats not going to help you unless you're actually using the Apple OS.

[Dukedudez]

Ok, so now I deleted the plugin on Mediamonkey that makes it act like an iPod.  Is there any easy way that will sort my computer music library into Artist/Album/File so I can put it on my iPod.  Please?

Edit:  Good news!  Mediamonkey now organizes the files by artist/album/file!  The artwork is starting to work too!  However, I'm still wide open to suggestions and tips and the ways you guys put stuff on to your rockbox!

[[Saint]]

However, I'm still wide open to suggestions and tips and the ways you guys put stuff on to your rockbox!

I'm willing to speculate that most of us already have a sanely ordered music library on our PCs/server, and simply use drag&drop, or a script to place music files on the device automatically.


[St.]

[Dukedudez]

Trudat.  Once my iPod is filled and all songs have album art.  I'll copy all the files on my Rockbox to a new music folder on my computer and then I'll be organized!

Edit:  On mediamonkey I'm updating all my tags for my 4,000 songs and I  have a question for the album art.  Should I save image to tag or album folder?  I've been choosing tag.  Also, I got a script for Mediamonkey called Album Art Tagger but I'm clueless on how to use it.  Thanks for the help!

[[Saint]]

On mediamonkey I'm updating all my tags for my 4,000 songs and I  have a question for the album art.  Should I save image to tag or album folder?  I've been choosing tag.

Personally, I think that if your albums are sanely organised (ie. /Music/Artist/Album/File.ext) that it isn't particularly wise to embed the album art in the file.

Its simply pointless duplication in my view.

Why have the album art duplicated for every file in the album, when it only need be there once? Removing the embedded album art (depending on the size of the art, and keeping in mind that art that is bigger than the maximum vertical resolution of your device is very wasteful) can free up a reasonable amount of hard disk space.

When you have a singular Folder.jpg or cover.jpg, it still works for the ful album, and there is no senseless duplication.

Many tagging programs are able to export embedded album art to the naming scheme of your choosing, Folder.jpg is the naming scheme I opt for personally.



[St.]

[Dukedudez]

Ya, I found MusicBrainz Picard and it tags my music very well.  I also consolidated my entire iTunes library so now my music is perfectly organized into artist/album/file.  It's still taking a while though, but it will be worth it.