Sorry, but I'm still not clear on some stuff and I need suggestions on others.

Question: If I understand correctly, the empeg, if playing a track with absolutely no ID info, will display something like "unknown track". The problem is that I have quite a few tracks that have no ID3 tag info. Can the empeg not show any information (ie file name)?

Suggestion request: those same files happen to be in my "other " folder. You see, I have a particular way I like to organize my mp3's. First by genre (although the majority of the 11GB -- about 9 -- are in "Rock & Pop"), then by artist, then by album. Then within the album, as I've encoded them this time, the songs have the format of "## - Artist - Track Title".

The problem is with these tracks in the "Rock & Pop\~other" folder. This is where I keep any and all tracks that I don't have a full album for. If one of these songs is by an artist I do have a full album for, however, I put it in the artist's folder.

Now after that organization, I have about 350 tracks in one folder. Those people with empegs who are familiar with the browsing structure, what do you reccomend as to how I organize what is essentially a 350 song album?

I'd really appreciate it if you could answer these questions. Sorry I couldn't find a more concise way to express it -- just wanted to give the full background.

DiGNAN

As far as I could read somewhere you're forced to give the mp3 an ID3 Tag by emplode. The ID3 Tag is the information you need for identifying your mp3's. You can't use the name of the mp3 when it's stored on the Mk2.

I'd recommend a ID3 Tag-editor something like mp3-Tag Studio to fill out all your mp3-Tags.

TeeMcBee

If emplode finds no ID3 tags, it will use the filename as the title, and leave the other fields blank.

Hugo

Ok! I think I misunderstood something... well ... still learning..sorry...

TeeMcBee

Cool! Good to hear it!

Hey, are there any plans for allowing the editing of playlists/ID tags directly from the empeg? perhaps in future software upgrades?

DiGNAN

Have you changed something in the software or have I totally missed something to stand so far beside the truth?

TeeMcBee

Erm, no, this has always been the behaviour as far as I can remember.

Hugo

I can't imagine why you would want to. The Empeg interface is not exactly conducive to that type of activity. Tag editing that can be accomplished in minutes using Emplode would take hours on the Empeg itself.

Corby
MKI, SN#320, 6-Gig Blue

Tag editing that can be accomplished in minutes using Emplode would take hours on the Empeg itself.

Or seconds using a proper piece of tag-editing software before even trying to load anything into Emplode.

Let me take this opportunity to emphasize for Dignan17 the importance of making sure all the tags in your collection are filled out before you start uploading. Some of my posts on the subject can be found here and here.

Hey, wait a minute. One of those posts was a reply to Dignan17 in another thread.

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Tony Fabris

Thank you for emphasizing your point, but I'm not about to go through and edit 350-400 tags one by one, even if it's with an editing program. I'd still have to input all the names myself, seeing as nearly all of them are by different artists.

I realize it's good to have ID tags filled out on all my MP3's, and that's why I recently started re-encoding my entire collection with complete tags (except for date, I don't care about that), and in a new filename format.

But I'm not planning on doing anything with the miscellaneous tracks.

And I don't think it would be hard to edit your own playlists on the empeg it'self if the ability was there. I think it's something that really should be in there. I don't like the idea that I can only make changes from my computer at home. I know the ID tag editing would be tedious, but I really hope the ability to edit playlists is added in the near future.

DiGNAN

Thank you for emphasizing your point, but I'm not about to go through and edit 350-400 tags one by one, even if it's with an editing program. I'd still have to input all the names myself, seeing as nearly all of them are by different artists.

Unless you happened to have the files and directories named in some kind of predictable pattern, in which case you could use one of those programs which batch-tags the MP3s based on the file/folder names. I don't have any links to such a program on hand, but I'm sure someone could jump in here and supply us with one. It might save you a lot of time.

And I don't think it would be hard to edit your own playlists on the empeg it'self if the ability was there.

I dunno, have you ever gone through something like that without a keyboard and a GUI? I dread simply naming my EQ presets from the remote, and those only have about eight characters.

I don't remember whether you actually have an Empeg yet or not, do you? If not, wait until you've actually got one and then decide whether or not you want playlist editing on-the-fly. It's one of those things where it looks desirable on paper, but turns out to be not necessary.

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Tony Fabris

Now, what I'm talking about is creating playlists.

Say I'm riding with someone new and they are in the mood for a particular type of music. Sorry, you'll have to look through my 4000 track collection after every song you play because you can't make a playlist now.

Then there's your own convenience. Say that I was in the mood for the Beatles and the album "Talk Show" (by Talk Show) because I wanted to see the influence the Beatles had on the band. I could create a playlist with a Beatles album and the Talk Show album and then randomize it.

What would be so hard about it?

Here's an example for how it might work: make one of the main menu options "Playlist Mode". You then go through your collection, and by simply playing a track or other playlist, it gets added to the list being created, just like enqueueing songs in Winamp instead of playing them automatically. Then when you say you're finished, then name the new list and it's stored where you want it or in a permanent directory for sans-emplode created playlists. Then if you wanted to move it later, you could do so in emplode.

I really don't see what the big deal with something like this would be, and it seems like something that would easily be done. I'm not talking about doing all this while driving, either. That would be stupid.

No, I don't own an empeg, but I still think this is something that should be implemented. Heck, you don't have to use it if you don't want to.

DiGNAN

Unless you happened to have the files and directories named in some kind of predictable pattern, in which case you could use one of those programs which batch-tags the MP3s based on the file/folder names. I don't have any links to such a program on hand, but I'm sure someone could jump in here and supply us with one. It might save you a lot of time.

As I said, they are 350-400 tracks that are all in one directory. They are named in completely different formats because I didn't create them.


I appreciate the help, really. I've tried several ID tag editing programs, and been very unimpressed by all of them. Of course, that was a year or two ago, I'm sure they've been improved, so which do you suggest? Any good ones on mp3.com in addition to the one you mentioned Tony?

DiGNAN

I'm sure they've been improved, so which do you suggest? Any good ones on mp3.com in addition to the one you mentioned Tony?

I don't really know tag editors that well, since I haven't had a need to bulk-rename/retag my files yet. I know such products exist, I've just never used any of them.

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Tony Fabris

Say I'm riding with someone new and they are in the mood for a particular type of music. Sorry, you'll have to look through my 4000 track collection after every song you play because you can't make a playlist now.

Oh, that! That's no big deal. You don't need to create playlists for your passenger to hear the music he wants. He just does a search. It'll create an ad-hoc playlist with the results of your search. You can search by title, artist, genre, year, or album. You just can't search on multiple combined permutations of those things at the same time.

So if you're listening to Morrisey and your passenger wants to hear some industrial, he just does a genre search on "industrial" and he's happy. Or if your passenger specifically wants Nine Inch Nails, he can search on that, too. Quite easily, in fact.

What he can't do is create a complex-filtered ad-hoc playlist combining hip-hop tracks with Industrial music from 1993 recorded on clear nights when the moon is full. Only simple one-parameter searches can be done from the remote control.

Say that I was in the mood for the Beatles and the album "Talk Show" (by Talk Show) because I wanted to see the influence the Beatles had on the band. I could create a playlist with a Beatles album and the Talk Show album and then randomize it.

You can do that right now. Works like a charm. Just tried it. But as I just reported in the Bug Reports forum, the feature has a minor bug in 11a. I'm sure it will be fixed soon, though...

Assuming the bug is fixed, here is what you'd do. Let's assume you're already playing a playlist of only "Beatles" tracks (whether it's a pre-created "Beatles" playlist or whether it was done with a "Search By Artist" doesn't matter). Go into the "Search by Artist" feature and hit the "CD-MD CH" button to switch it from "Search By Artist" to "Append By Artist". Locate "Talk Show" and hit DNPP. Bam- you've now got a combined Beatles/TalkShow playlist playing.

Right now, when I tried it, it induced the bug, but the bug is really minor: it just interrupts the current song, reshuffles the playlist, and plays a random song from the middle of the playlist. But the contents of the playlist are correct now. In my case I started a "Yes" playlist, then added all of my "Aimee Mann" tracks to it. It's now shuffling Aimee Mann songs with Yes songs. An odd combination, but hey, the feature works.

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Tony Fabris

So if you're listening to Morrisey and your passenger wants to hear some industrial, he just does a genre search on "industrial" and he's happy. Or if your passenger specifically wants Nine Inch Nails, he can search on that, too. Quite easily, in fact.

Sorry, I just want something more specific and integrated.

But I still fail to see why something like this would be so difficult to implement or hard to use.

I also am not so specific in my genres. I have either rock, jazz, or classical.

I beg of you Hugo, please experiment with this!!

DiGNAN

Hmm i dont understand why. Are you going to be doing multi variable searches while driving? I dont have one yet, so I cant comment on how easy it is to use the search functions. Do you have one yet? Have you watched the video on how the empeg works? That will give you a idea of how the searches work.

Sorry, I just want something more specific and integrated.

I'm not quite sure how much more specific or how much more integrated you'd need it to be. Since you haven't got an Empeg yet, you seem to be afraid that its search/playlist functions will somehow be substandard. Trust me, when using the Empeg, I've got no problem finding the music I want when I want it. And I don't have that many playlists defined. In fact, aside from a bunch of artist playlists with album subtrees, I've only got a few "mood" playlists and that's about it. Yet if I want to hear something specific, I can do it pretty easily from the remote.

For example, today I got two new albums in the mail from Amazon. I ripped them and uploaded them to the Empeg before taking a 2-hour drive. As I started off on the drive, I fired up one of the albums, then used the "append by source" feature to add the second album, and both albums shuffled as I took the drive. I didn't have to create a special playlist to do it.

Before you panic about the playlist and search features, wait until you get your Empeg, play with it for a while, and then see what you think.

I also am not so specific in my genres. I have either rock, jazz, or classical.

And I hardly ever search on genre (or year for that matter) anyhow. I usually just search on artist, title or album. It's more than enough for me.

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Tony Fabris

Hi Dignan,
I've been following your questions and the anwers here that suggest you use the empeg playlist feature, but I think that -- although playlist maintenance through emplode is easy -- it cannot do what you want. With emplode you can group the albums or tracks into anything you like easily and give them a name and bingo: your personal playlist structure is there. Very simple and intuitive; powerful and very well thought out.

I guess that the problem with your MP3s is that they are poorly documented and that you need to listen to them before deciding on the playlist they belong to and that you want to do this while driving. Though empeg allows you to search for tracks and thus allows you to create a playlist on the fly, this will not help you as this capability requires meaningful tags, which you haven't got. Also, the empeg can't save dynamic lists.

As you don't have an empeg yet, I suggest you start re-organising the tags of the files on your PC. I use TagRename for this. Once you've got used to its UI, it is a fairly powerful utility. I like it because, besides a load of other things, it supports a.o.:

- filling in tags from file names
- renaming files from tags
- batch edit of any or all tags for (selected or all) files in a folder
- a tag editor that commits the edit and moves onto the next file of a folder quickly (very nice; I'd wish emplde had something like this)

Have a look at it. You can download from http://softpointer.com



Henno
ex 00120
did score one of the 40

It seems to me that simple feature to save dynamic changes (additions through search and, perhaps, deletions) to playlists on empeg itself (together with naming the list if it is brand new) would both satisfy DiGNAN's wish and be relatively easy to implement. Then again, perhaps some reorganization of disk partitions would be necessary (we would not like to remount main music partitions R/W while driving, would we), so maybe this is not so trivial, after all...

Regarding ID3 tagging a pile of incosistently named miscaleneous tracks, I would use some command-line tagger utility, prepare a command file from the dir listing with default assignment of both artist and track title from the filenames, and then do some editing directly in command file. (That's the way Unix addicts to things :) I guess you could prepare command file at a rate of some 200 tracks per hour (if you know what is in the files, of course).

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
#5196

Let me just ask you. On your computer, when playing songs in Winamp, do you ever go into your music collection and pick specific songs that you feel like listening to? I find it hard to believe that if you feel like listening to a particular song on your computer, that you add the entire album when you don't have to.

I understand where you all are coming from, and I know that the search function is going to be a useful tool, but I don't think that for me it's going to be useful for creating dynamic playlists.

Heck, I don't even care if I'd be able to save the list, just as long as I'd be able to add songs, ONE BY ONE to an existing dynamic playlist.

Oh well, it's obvious no one is going to understand what I'm getting at here, so I'll just be happy with the empeg as it is (providing I'm able to get it in the first place).

DiGNAN

I think it was stated that you can add song by song to an existing playlist.

"Assuming the bug is fixed, here is what you'd do. Let's assume you're already playing a playlist of only "Beatles" tracks (whether it's a pre-created "Beatles" playlist or whether it was done with a "Search By Artist" doesn't matter). Go into the "Search by Artist" feature and hit the "CD-MD CH" button to switch it from "Search By Artist" to "Append By Artist". Locate "Talk Show" and hit DNPP. Bam- you've now got a combined Beatles/TalkShow playlist playing. Right now, when I tried it, it induced the bug, but the bug is really minor: it just interrupts the current song, reshuffles the playlist, and plays a random song from the middle of the playlist. But the contents of the playlist are correct now. In my case I started a "Yes" playlist, then added all of my "Aimee Mann" tracks to it. It's now shuffling Aimee Mann songs with Yes songs. An odd combination, but hey, the feature works."

You can add songs to a dynamic playlist individually, I think Tony already explained that. How you locate those songs is up to you - searching my artist, title, album, etc - you can scroll through your entire track list if you want!

If you want to understand how this works it might be helpful to download the user guide, which is available in the support section of the web site. There are a few new features that aren't in there, though, such as "Listen to more songs by this artist" and real time shuffle.

Rob

I appologize, he did say that. I wasn't thinking you could use that procedure for individual songs.

And thank you for that tag editor, I might use it for some of the tracks (if I have time).

DiGNAN

Sorry I hadn't made it clear before. Like they said, you can dynamically add single songs (searching by song title), entire albums (searching by album name), entire artist catalogs, or entire genres.

Or, for any of those things, you can also just do a straight search without dynamically adding. For instance you could type in the name of a specific song and it would start a playlist of that song only. The choice of either creating a whole new playlist from the seach or dynamically adding to the current playlist from the search is a single keystroke on the remote.

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Tony Fabris

Then in that case (sorry to keep this goig), all I was interested in seeing was a way to append the current dynamic playlist by browsing for songs to add. I forget if you said this or not, but after searching for song/album/artist/genre, do you get a choice of whether or not you want to add the song(s)?

I'm just saying it would be nice to look through my collection instead of searching for songs (heck, I don't always know what I want to listen to ). That's all that I'd suggest.

DiGNAN

I was interested in seeing was a way to append the current dynamic playlist by browsing for songs to add.

That's a good question. There's really two modes of selecting tunes in the Empeg:

The first is by navigating the playlist tree. That's the part that's most closely analagous to browsing. In that mode, you start at the top of the tree and can navigate through all the subtrees, all the way down to an individual song buried deep in a subtree if you want. At any point during this "browse", you can choose to hit the "play" icon or to keep browsing. So you can hit play at any branch of the tree and it'll play that branch and all of its sub-branches. Or you can drill down to an individual song, hit play, and it'll play just that song.

But at the current time, when you are browsing the playlist tree, it doesn't offer the option to append. The append option is only available in...

... The second mode, searches. From this mode, you can search the tag data. The searches are by song title, artist name, album name, or genre. You enter the letters to search for using the number keys on the remote. The list starts with "everything", then gets shorter as you enter letters from the remote. The results of your search are very linear, and aren't anything at all like the multilevel playlist tree. They are displayed in a single alphabetical list. Now you can browse this list, but only in a linear fashion, scrolling up and down amongst your current search results. At this point, a single button toggles between appending to or replacing your current playlist. And you still have the option to scroll through these search results or to further narrow your search by typing more letters. Once you've settled on a single search result, you hit a button to confirm it. (This single result could be a single song, an entire album, an entire genre, or an entire artist's catalog, depending on what you chose to search for.)

after searching for song/album/artist/genre, do you get a choice of whether or not you want to add the song(s)?

Right. You can cancel out of the search at any time, or you can narrow the search further, or you can toggle between append/replace at any time. And nothing changes until you hit that final button to confirm- the current playlist keeps playing this whole time.

I'm just saying it would be nice to look through my collection instead of searching for songs

That's more like the first option, browsing the playlist tree. The only drawback is that you can't "append" from that mode, you can only append from searches. This sounds like a limitation, but it's really not. Again, once you actully get an Empeg and try it out, you find that it's easy to hear the music you want to hear. Don't worry about it.

But this gives me an idea. It would seem to me that with the new playlist code in place, it'd be possible to add the append feature to the playlist browser. Using the same button that toggles append mode in the search window, you could toggle append mode while browsing the playlist tree. Hmm...

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Tony Fabris

I have a quick question to add to this... Is there a way to insert a song into the currently playing playlist... ie I occasionally would like to hear a specific track while I am in the middle of a long playlist. I don't want to stop the playlist and lose where it is up to, I just want to insert a track to be played next and then have the playlist continue from where it was.

So far I can replace the current playlist with a track I search for... which stops the playlist and requires me to restart it afterwards from the beginning...

Or I can append a track I search for to the current playlist... but that means the track I searched for won't play until the playlist finishes...

Have I missed something...?

Cheers

Kim

There's currently no insert function; 1.1 has bookmarking which allows you to save & restore your current playlist and position: this is great for me when I'm doing a demo, I can save where I was up to in my big random playlist, then return to it later.

Hugo

Thanks... that sounds like it would do for what I want... I would be interested to see how the interaction with the bookmarks will work...

But I suppose I can wait til 1.1 and see... (am I going to be waiting long...? *smile*)

Cheers

Kim

Personally, I can't imagine where you get three or four hundred songs with little or no information in the filename. When downloading from Napster (yes, I do it - so?) I pretty much always go back and rename the files by hand to fit my preferred convention of Artist - Title. Applying a tag from filename editor from there would be easy.

I'd suggest you have a look into that song identification program mentioned in another thread. After you use that to identify the songs and fill in the tags, you can use Tag Studio to rename the files.

Voila! All organised.

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.

*AHEM* If you'll notice PaulWay, this thread last finished in the beginning of July. Not quite sure why it was brought up again instead of making a new thread, but hey, whatever floats their boat.

Anyway, I'm faaaar too lazy to go through and name all these songs. Plus, what I did once upon a time was take out whatever ID info was in there. This was mostly because I found that filenames were often more accurate than tags were, and because some tags were filled out and some weren't, I wanted them all to be the same and just took them all off. It was easier that way. I also wanted them to look the same as my CD collection MP3 files, which had no tags. To be honest, if the empeg hadn't come along, I would have been perfectly happy without tags on any of those files and I would have been happy with the file name convention I had, which was mainly just the name of each song.

Any way, as I've said elsewhere, now that I have my empeg, I still don't like not being able to append the current song without searching. However, I believe Rob said that they were considering this as a possibility for a later release, so no complaints here.

The main reason I want this is the same reason Tony would use the song appending in the search mode. Which is namely so that you can add songs to the current list while not interupting the song(s) you're listening to at the moment.

I find the search mode to be very well done, but there are just two things I don't like about it:
1) you can't add playlists using this method
2) it's too difficult/impossible to use while driving (especially if your display is as dark as mine )

Right now, I can usually pick out some of my stuff by touch/memory. For instance, using the faceplate, down-down-right-right-right-down-down starts my Beach Boys playlist. Then it's the same number of button presses on the remote. But if there were a way to append during the playlist browsing, all I'd have to do is hit one more button and viola! Beach Boys are added at the end of my current playlist!

I'm really looking forward to something like this.

DiGNAN

There's currently no insert function; 1.1 has bookmarking which allows you to save & restore your current playlist and position: this is great for me when I'm doing a demo, I can save where I was up to in my big random playlist, then return to it later.

You save your position in a randomly generated playlist? What's the point of that? If you're using 1.1 you can shuffle by least recently heard, thus (a) solving your problem and (b) saving you from potentially hearing the demo tracks again in your playlist.

Peter