Clip+ Synch

[Excalibur]

Ok - I recently bought a 4gb clip+ & 16gb card and despite reading the manual / looking on this forum, I'm lost.

A little background:

• I keep all my music in separate folders (by album) under the music directory of my Vista PC. For example: in the music directory, I have a subdirectories for rush-power windows and a separate one for rush-moving pictures.
• I am an ipod convertee so I was previously using itunes and had my 'library' pointed to the music directory to pick up all my music.
• I have more music then I have space on the ipod so I decided to move away from apple and go w/ the expandability of the clip+

On my machine, I also have WMP 11. When I run that, it picks up all the tunes from my hard-drive and indexes them into its library.


Now...my questions:
What's the easiest/cleanest way to:
a) get all my music from my hard-drive onto the 16gb card for the clip+
b) get a few playlists onto the clip+


My points of confusion:

• I know that I can use a drag & drop method to port the music and believe that i have to choose the player, then the external card's music folder. From there, all I see are references to folks putting individual tracks in. Instead of doing that, can I put my subdirectories like I have on my hard-drive ?
• If I use WMP instead of drag & drop, do I need to first create a playlist of every track I own and synch it ? or...is there an easy way to use WMP to first port all the music from my hard-drive's music folder over to the 16gb card. Then follow that with a few playlists that reference tracks I copied over previously.

All in all, I want to get every one of my tracks (maybe about 10gb) onto the clip + and be able to play them either by artist, album or based off a few playlists like 'workout tunes', etc.


Lastly - I'm not stuck on WMP and would be willing to try other software if there are better, free picks out there. So...if anyone is willing to give me some pointers, I'm open to suggestion.


Thanks in advance

[CrowdAds]

[FreeZ5]

Originally Posted by Excalibur

• I know that I can use a drag & drop method to port the music and believe that i have to choose the player, then the external card's music folder. From there, all I see are references to folks putting individual tracks in. Instead of doing that, can I put my subdirectories like I have on my hard-drive ?

Thanks in advance

Yes you can drag & drop directories to the player.

I can't really help with your other q's...I don't use WMP (or any other music manager), and I set my players to MSC (not MTP or Autodetect).

Steve

[Excalibur]

So, if I go that route, will the player's internal memory show up as a separate target from the uSD ?

And...from there, I guess I could drag & drop every one of my music subdirectories onto the uSD card's music folder.

If you "synch" using this method, does the database still aggregate things across all the subdirectories and allow you to play all the music of a given artist ? (for example -- I have about 35 albums by Rush)

Will I be able to go in and say music...artist...rush and then have it play all.

Or...will I need to manually build a playlist of all songs by rush and then play that ?

[FreeZ5]

Originally Posted by Excalibur

So, if I go that route, will the player's internal memory show up as a separate target from the uSD ?

And...from there, I guess I could drag & drop every one of my music subdirectories onto the uSD card's music folder.

If you "synch" using this method, does the database still aggregate things across all the subdirectories and allow you to play all the music of a given artist ? (for example -- I have about 35 albums by Rush)

Will I be able to go in and say music...artist...rush and then have it play all.

Or...will I need to manually build a playlist of all songs by rush and then play that ?

I assume that you are asking about MSC. You can d&d in MTP as well.

In MTP, the Clip+ will be one device with two memories and no drive letters. In MSC, the two memories show as separate devices with drive letters.

Yes the database is built across both memories from the MUSIC directories and subdirectories. There may be a limit to the number of sub-directories (I have a simple structure on my players). So yes, you can pick Rush and get all songs with "Rush" as the artist name (from both memories). If the artist name is "Russh", it will be separate.

Playlists are only necessary (IMO) when you want to achieve a mix that is not a single selection from the database. Some people use Genre to substitute for playlists, especially if the songs cross memories. Some folks have problems with playlists. I find them real easy.

Hope I've answered your questions.

Steve

[Excalibur]

Yes, that helps quite a bit.

When I have time, I'm going to:
a) reformat the player - to wipe out all the music I put on the internal storage just to try out
b) set to MSC mode
c) put the 16gb card in
d) connect and navigate to the drive representing the uSD
e) copy all my music into the music directory
f) download & install Playlist Creator 3.6.2 (freeware) to build compatible playlists and then put them in the appropriate place also. I read about this in another post and it sounds like it will make my job easy.

Beyond the simple play by artist or album, I do have some use for playlists because I like to make mixes up for use when I'm working out and sometimes those span across multiple subdirectories in my music folder.

Last question -- when you set the player to msc mode and put the uSD card in, does it do a "format" of sorts on the card to make it ready to accept media. In other words, will the player write a starting directory structure onto the card ?

If so, could I just pop the card out of the clip+ and into my computer's card reader/writer and do all the copying directly. Then just put it back in the clip+ when I'm done ?

Thanks again,
Mark

[FreeZ5]

Originally Posted by Excalibur

Last question -- when you set the player to msc mode and put the uSD card in, does it do a "format" of sorts on the card to make it ready to accept media. In other words, will the player write a starting directory structure onto the card ?

If so, could I just pop the card out of the clip+ and into my computer's card reader/writer and do all the copying directly. Then just put it back in the clip+ when I'm done ?

Thanks again,
Mark

Mark:

"format" - not the right word, but yes the player builds a couple of directories on a blank card.

Most of the time, I do my copying direct to the card in the player. But for a major loading, especially if it's faster than a Class 4 card, using the computer's card slot will probably be faster.

Steve

[Excalibur]

terrific - thanks again for responding !