Ok, I know, but it was a trade so I couldn't pass by getting the Zune.

Now I am trying to figure out how to get the Computer (Windows XP Pro SP3) to see the Zune as an HD so I can drag and drop music to it.

I have googled and found a lame hack that lets you see the Zune but not really move files around much.

Now I KNOW that the Empegger can whip this problem.

As always I am in awe of y'all and appreciate the help!

Not sure you can? Looks like the Zune operates in a similar way to the empeg and ipod where they have a database which needs to be regenerated.

Yeah as far as I could tell it doesn't work that way. Everyone wants to do it like the ipod. Drag and drop would be nice but if they are going to fix anything I would rather them fix the on the fly playlist making.

I don't know about iPod, as I have never had one. But my cheap 3 year old, 20.00 mp3 player could do drag and drop. I don't think it is an iPod thing!

No, I am saying the ipod does not do drag and drop so in trying to copy the ipod they made it require some music management software.

While I can somewhat understand the deep techie need to manage down to the file level, I never quite understood why people practically require it as a feature on MP3 players. The empeg pretty much showed very good reasons for using a database method for music, I can't imagine having a drag and drop MP3 player with gigs of music.

A good compromise would be to let the device accept files via drag and drop, but then internally have the software on the device add them to the database. That way you can get away from poor syncing software, but still get the benefits of having a database.

The Trekstor Vibez works the way you describe (as do Carbon and Forge, for that matter). If I had to choose between a player with a database, and a player with mass-storage class ("drive-letter") support, that'd be a really difficult decision. But it's a false dichotomy: I'd rather choose a player with both. Or rather, all three: having a database on the player allows useful advanced UI features; having a database in the PC software allows useful advanced sync features; and having mass-storage support (or, via Ethernet, FTP) as the mediation between those two databases allows other useful stuff such as non-music-file support and zero-PC-footprint music adding or deleting (in Internet cafes, for instance).

Some other MP3 players have a halfway-house solution, where dragged-and-dropped music is accessible through a Folders menu, but doesn't get folded-in to the soup menus except by the PC-side software. Iriver players used to work like that, and we considered it for Sapphire as a fall-back solution if we couldn't get the real thing working in time. (Eventually the database turned out to not be among Sapphire's biggest problems.)

Quite frankly, it's a royal pain that the car-player isn't drag-and-drop. But the Trekstor Vibez self-databasing code is a lot more complex and was a lot more work than what went into the car-player. (And writing our own USB mass-storage target, when we came to do it, was no fun at all. But if anyone were making the Empeg these days, Linux 2.6 has one built-in.)

Peter

That would be a specific feature of the MP3 player itself. If the Zune only wants to look at a database then you're going to have to get something to recreate it.

And you need to be careful to not fill up your Carbon's SD card all in one go as when it rebuilds the database it can run out of space. I learned this the hard way and while it attempts to recover by deleting random tracks it can still end up in an endless reboot cycle.

I was looking around, but could not find anything like Rockbox for the zoon. Has anybody seen anything like this? A RockBox type solution for the zoon would be great! - not to mention a delicious slap in the face to M$.

I don't think anyone really cares enough about the Zune to bother. I mean, really, who would even buy a player that comes in brown?

I continue to be astounded that someone selected that to be the showy colored version. Brown? Really?

As the resident Archos fanboy on the board, I have to chime in and say that the Archos does this and more. They give you mass storage device AND syncing/music management through Windows Media Player. AND they give you two options on the player its self by letting you browse in soup mode or simply browse the directory tree on the player.

Personally, I like having total control over the file structure of my music. The reason I don't like music management software and soup modes is that they are completely unforgiving when it comes to tag information. Mistakes and incomplete information become an issue, and I can't stand how compilation albums are treated. I don't want to go into my Artist category and, just because I have a few soundtracks, suddenly I have twice the artists I used to, making it harder to scroll through to the one I want. Just because I like the Garden State soundtrack doesn't mean I want Bonnie Somerville taking up equal importance with Blind Melon and AC/DC.

Sorry, went off on a rant at the end there...

I thought the brown looked good so whatever :P




I totally agree with you on this. I think I already asked you someplace else but have forgetten how the archos compares to the empeg as far as on the fly playlist creation.

Fair enough rant, and it really proves that the firmware in any case needs to be decent.

Browsing a folder structure to me is poor, because it's still not the hierarchal niceness the empeg had. I could have a piece of music in as many places in the hierarchy that I wanted while only one file was actually on disk taking up space, hence the niceness of a database. It also added metadata at the folder levels, allowing me to specify X folder as audiobooks and to exclude them from a mass shuffle, something not possible with just pure MSC And I could really care less what the files look like once they are on the device. So keeping the folder structure to me is a negative of mass storage usage.

A bit of a tangent here, but hey, it's off topic...

My ultimate dream for media storage on the home server was to have some SQL driven database keeping tabs on FLAC files somewhere. In the database would be all the artist, album and so on info, then this database would tie into plugins for Samba that would present the music back out as nice files. At the top level, you could have MP3 128bit, MP3 VBR, OGG, FLAC, and whatever. Inside each would be folders listing albums, and inside there would be the nicely named 1. A Song.file files. If a system accesses a file, the Samba plugin goes to work on real time converting the FLAC to whatever format based on the parent folder picked. You could even create parent level folders specific to a device to then point the syncing software to.

If I could find a solution similar to what our beloved Empeg database software does (Emplode?), I would be THRILLED. I just think the Zune software app sux.

Peter cobbled something like that together a couple of years ago...

It was based on all-Empeg code, though (i.e. not something I've still got access to), plus it was a really old version of Samba and they kept changing the plugin API.

Really, though, Samba isn't the Right Answer as it's too onerous on the client. If you want to pick music by genre or year, you can either build a database on the client (heavyweight) or do it by creating even more soup folders in the Samba plugin (but then, as SMB can't represent symbolic links, the client can't easily tell when two files are the same track). It would, in fact, be a bit like using a mass-storage MP3 player that isn't self-databasing.

And all the transcoding stuff would be nifty, but only really works for streaming. If the client supports fast-forward or rewind, and starts seeking in, say, a VBR MP3 transcoded on-the-fly from a FLAC, the server is in a world of hurt.

My current thinking on this is that, unlike with a portable player, you can't put the database in the client, which means that you really need UPnP or similar as the remote-access-database layer; and also, if you have clients that can only play MP3, you need the MP3 and FLAC files complete and pre-existing on the server if seeking is going to work.

Alternatively, if your media server runs Windows, you get to use Windows Media Connect. It's a Microsoft product that's robust, unobtrusive, does the job, and does so by implementing the relevant open standards fully and efficiently. Which is not something you'll often hear me say.

Peter

I think thats probably where I got the idea from then. It will probably remain a pie in the sky thing for a long time though, as I haven't been nearly as serious as I used to about my music collection. Definitely not serious enough to even start coding something. Knowing that peter started with empeg code doesn't help either, though maybe if I drive down the street and ask Sigmatel, err Freescale nicely... :-)

For now, I do have uPnP and iTunes sharing enabled on my NAS, and it does share out the music nicely to the network clients for streaming. I'll have to look into Chorale, sounds handy for if I do ever get around to reripping all my music to FLAC now that I have the space.

Peter,
How would you compare Chorale vs MPD?

I hadn't seen MPD before (well, unless it's a fork of ye olde mserv, but it doesn't look like it is). Off the top of my head:

• Chorale knows when it has MP3 and FLAC versions of the same file, so you can make a playlist once (in Rio Music Manager, say) and it plays back in MP3s on a MP3 player and in FLACs on a MP3+FLAC player;
• MPD supports Vorbis and AAC;
• Chorale's network protocols are the standard UPnP ones, so you can use third-party hardware (eg Roku Soundbridge) with it, as opposed to MPD's custom protocol;
• MPD does gapless and cross-fading (have you seen the amount of code you need to do that in Gstreamer? one day Chorale will throw out Gstreamer and do it properly);
• Chorale is a big cross-bar of music servers, music outputs, and music controllers; MPD is one-server, one-output, one-controller, and all the music must reside (or be mounted from) the server with the audio output in;
• MPD supports Internet radio but not Freeview; Chorale supports Freeview but not (yet) Internet radio.

Really I'd say MPD isn't an attempt to solve the same problems...

Peter