Hi everyone,

My GF just got a new 5G iPod to go along with her Powerbook. I some multi-platform interoperability questions about this whole thing and figured that you guys have probably cracked this nut already.

Our MP3 collection (we added her entire CD collection when we "shacked up") sits on a linux file server. I've mentioned in other threads that we're both really into music, and the MP3 collection is enormous (approx. 460GB). I started this whole thing when many of you did, before there were v2 tags, and many of the files have bad tags. My ripping/encoding tool at the beginning also did not handle the year tag correctly, so the oldest files are *all* tagged 1994...

Anyhow, we're retagging the entire collection and are about 35% complete.

Since our mp3s are already organized on the server, we don't really need iTunes to "manage" our music collection for us. In fact, I don't want it to.

Since we have both a Powerbook and Windows machines available, what is the best tool to use to manage the iPod content? Is iTunes the best option given that we have the mp3s already organized on the file server? Should we bother with iTunes at all?

If we want to use iTunes as a player, is there any way to build the iTunes library without importing all of the files into iTunes. Is there any software out there that can run on the server and create the iTunes library (which I think is just an XML file) using the file structure? ISTR someone here mentioning a iTunes server that can run on linux/Unix...

Thanks again. I may have asked some of these questions before, but its all jumbled up now.

Jim

You can definitely use iTunes without having it copy the music into it's own directories. You just uncheck the option to "copy files to Library" somewhere in the Preferences.

You could run a daapd server on the Linux box, which would cause the Linux box to appear to iTunes to be just another iTunes computer on the network with all of your music already on it. However, I don't think you can get the iPod to sync with music shared with daap.

It sounds like your best bet is to just get iTunes to build it's library out of your files without copying them over, and then arrange things however you want to sync them to the iPod. Only caveats are that any changes you make to the tags in iTunes aren't just local to it's database; they'll propagate to your files (which may be good or bad in your case). Additionally, other metadata gets written to your files as well, like the "Soundcheck" volume normalizing data.

There may be some other third party product that works better for what you want, but when it comes to iPod, I only know iTunes personally.

I'm not an iPod expert (never had one), but I would go about it a slightly different way. I like the way my system works (It works great with XBMC, the Empeg, the Karma, and iTunes over the network), hopefully you can get some ideas.

I do store all my music on a Linux fileserver. A long time ago when I started ripping my music, I kept all the filenames and directories accurate to a format (%A - %AL/%N %A - %T where %A = artist, %AL = album, %N = tracknumber, %T = trackname). With a slightly dirty but reliable Perl script, I re-tagged everything in one big swoop. Then year, genre and albumart was added on an album by album basis. That sorted it out nicely.

About 40% of my music was in FLAC (I don't know how to tag these btw). Another little Perl script later and I have /data/raid/lossless/ which is the original archive, and /data/raid/lossy/ where everything that was MP3 already is just symlinked over, and all the albums in FLAC are transcoded to.

/data/raid/lossy/ is the music directory for mt-daapd, which makes all my music magically appear in iTunes on any machine on my network.

I would plug the iPod into the Linux machine and use something like gtkpod to put music on it. If you don't have a monitor attached, or X configured or whatever, you can always run it in a remote X session. It is easy to do on a Mac, or another Linux machine. Windows? I have no idea.

I'm not sure if this answers your question or not, but you can easily put music on the iPod via iTunes without it ever touching the iTunes database. Start up iTunes and plug in your iPod. The iPod will show up on the left-hand column. Click on it to show what's on the iPod. Now just drag stuff from your filesystem into there. It will just put it on the iPod without iTunes ever trying to do anything with its database at all. That doesn't provide any way for automatic updates, but I don't know if that's something that the iTunes/iPod combo would do nowadays anyway, or if you'd be interested even if it did.

I used to use Xplay from Mediafour when I had an iPod, very simple and clean interface.

Good tip, Bitt. I seriously wonder if iTunes would have a max database size, where 460 gig might be pushing it. Drag and drop from Windows Explorer is nice though.