Rockbox Technical Forums
Rockbox General => Rockbox General Discussion => Topic started by: NooB ICAN on December 04, 2008, 03:31:33 PM
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I love the idea behind open sourcing. Nothing grates my cheese like seeing the big guys ignore, or worse, take advantage of us little guys. I feel like Apple has forgotten us iPod Video users by not upgrading our interface to one similar to that used by the newer (and much more expensive) models of iPods.
Thank you ROCKbox for taking up the challenge!
Love the idea of upgrading to an application that will allow me to customize my interface and display. I’m desperately jealous of my girlfriend’s new iPod Classic and her scrolling interface (but not quite enough to buy an iPod touch).
After spending the last hour or so reading through the forums, I have a couple of questions for anyone who would wish to answer them – while, of course, acknowledging the few administrators who seem to relish every opportunity to shame us poorly educated non-C coder end users back into the shadows. :-\ I apologize if I've posted this in the wrong forum or in the wrong format. We love you guys and your work. We are simply trying to figure this thing out.
There are two iTunes features that I think I would miss after moving to ROCKbox and I would like to hear how you guys have worked through them.
1). The graphics – I have ~150gbs of music and audio book files organized by artist\album\*.mp3. All the albums have cover art as jpgs and art has been added to each of the mp3 files. How have you-all dealt with this? What work-arounds or programs have you used to make the transition to bmps? Do you guys even care about that stuff?
2). The interface – That much music doesn’t fit on my 80gb iPod Video. My directories are already set up and drag-n-drop would work for me. But I love the graphical interface music selection that iTunes provides. I don’t want every album of many of the artists. Have you found anything that offers functions similar to iTunes? What are the work-arounds or programs that you have come up with? Do you even care about that stuff?
Thank you so much. I look forward to hearing how you guys work with your files.
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In response to point 1, there are utilities that can extract the album art images from the metadata info of your mp3s, and people have made or found utilities to facilitate easier conversion of those files to appropriately-sized bitmaps. You can go here (http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/AlbumArt#Useful_tools) to find them and see what works for you. (I don't know much about iTunes, but you might want to see if it has a way of downloading and saving album art images to the hard drive as well, that could save you getting an app you don't need... It does download album art, doesn't it..?)
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1) I used a script (in linux) to quickly and easily convert them into the format and sizes I wanted (along with correct naming for the different sizes). I believe there is a script on the AlbumArt wiki page that will convert them for you, but I haven't looked at it.
2) I just drag and drop. I would imagine that any itunes like music management program that lets you treat the DAP as a hard disk would work though.
while, of course, acknowledging the few administrators who seem to relish every opportunity to shame us poorly educated non-C coder end users back into the shadows. :-\
*sigh* This just isn't true and you know it. We just like people to try to look for themselves first and abide by the guidelines that they agreed to on signing up.
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1) Some tagging programs will allow you to save embedded album art to a file. I think EasyTag and maybe MP3Tag can do this (but it has been a while since I have dealt with any embedded album art).
IrfanView can do batch conversion/renaming if you have cover images in the wrong size/format.
2) I also just use drag-and-drop.
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I can confirm that EasyTag does allow saving of embedded album art, I added it to the AlbumArt wiki page a while ago.
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1) Everyone else has answered that already. ;)
2) I just use drag-and-drop as well.
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For album art, I made a script which uses ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php) and some small utilities to make 256x256 PNG icons for Vista. The process is automated, though non-square images can sometimes result in a bad crop, and so I look through cropped files to see what needs some touching up. To make album art for Rockbox, I can extract the PNG info from the .ICO files and then use ImageMagick to resize and convert the image.
I've transferred files in various ways. Most times I've just dragged and dropped, but sometimes I tried to automate refilling the entire device, because dragging and dropping from multiple locations involves far too much waiting. (Nothing prevents me from having multiple copy operations running simultaneously, but that would probably lead to a lot of fragmentation.)
I'm pretty happy with my latest attempt. I used "du -Sm" to get a list of how many megs were in each directory. Then I imported that into Excel, and trimmed stuff out while monitoring the sum. When that became too hard I randomly selected a subset of what was remaining. I exported the list of directories to a text file and used sed and a text editor to create batch files to create directories and copy files. If I look at what I wrote here it seems like a lot of work, but it's less work than drag and drop.
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Thank you all for your responses. I appreciate your feedback.
(I don't know much about iTunes, but you might want to see if it has a way of downloading and saving album art images to the hard drive as well, that could save you getting an app you don't need... It does download album art, doesn't it..?)
iTunes does allow album art. It even allows me to edit the mp3 info.
And that's really the only reason I'm slow to switch. I began the whole project as a diy juke box. So from the beginning I saved a 600x600 pixel jpg for each album. I like being able to view the artwork as I browse through deciding what to load onto my ipod.
Thank you again.
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stick with iTunes then I'd say. Personally I like how rockbox dispenses with the need for 'transfer' software. You can use your file explorer. AlbumArt is unneeded, if you ask me. It's a nice feature but it's not rockbox.
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How is album art not Rockbox..? It's not as if album art support has to be added via a patch anymore like it had been for so long, it's part of the core code. Also, it looks like there's a bitmap resize patch (forum topic here (http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=19656.0)) that may make it into SVN soon so making album art images will be even easier since one will only need to make one larger image which can be scaled down for themes using smaller images...
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Ok sorry. I meant it's not me. I equated me with rockbox. haha
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Ah, I'll leave ya be now then.
*goes to mess around elsewhere*
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Can you ref me to that?? FS####