Importing iTunes music to BB1 question and wish list entry

[derek Jacob]

Hi

So whilst I’m getting comfy with the BB1 I’ve imported some music from my iTunes library before going all out and upgrading the SD card.

After realising I had to do something different to get the album artwork to show all seemed well. 

Rookie mistake No1 was to have named the folder on my memory stick with ‘Brennan Transfer’. All the music seems prefaced with that tag now; so I’m going to have to clear it out and then reimport it from a USB stick with no other folders above the individual albums.   A tad irritating but hey ho.

But after importing 28Gig of music all looking pretty with artwork I then found I cant search by artist. In the import I know I had ‘Africa’ by Toto at least 4 times. It’s my go to track for Audio approval and how I measure quality of output. But could I search for it - no.

I may be saying something out of order here but surely as iTunes is the predominant digital music engine pretty much everywhere why doesn’t it appear. I have to be honest with over 300Gig of music I really don’t want to be fiddling with it all so I can find an artist.  I think most people store music by album (for instance ‘About Time soundtrack which has 14 or so different artists in) and I suspect most people listen to music by album.

I really do like the BB1 after 4 days of having it in my hands; I don’t need YouTube but I wanted a media ‘jukebox’ where I could do what I do on my Mac and my iPod (a 128Gig SSD bespoke device) but without having to connect to an external speaker (which the BB1 has) and I also wanted Internet Radio.  But last night I was on the verge of boxing it and sending it back to Amazon because my iPad (yes I do love Apple products) will do all the BB1 does and especially allows me to find Toto.  But the BB1 is growing on me so its in Limbo at the moment.

I’m sure there must be an easy way of importing an existing MP3 Album which contains all the relevant metadata and I’m sure I cant be the only person to get frustrated.  I bow to the cleverness of Martin B (you have made a unique product) and ask if there is nothing simple that I need to do please can you build an option that makes it simple to pull the existing file in and retain the ‘Album title, track name, Artist’ data.

Thanks  

[Daniel Taylor]

The Brennan boxes require that the imported music have a specific folder and file structure.  The top folder must be named for the Artist.  Each Artist folder contains only Album folders.  Then each Album folder contains the song files and the coverart.jpg file.

I think the initial mistake you might have made was to have each Album folder contained in the single folder named Brennan Transfer.  The BB1 interpreted that as being the Artist name.  What you could do is to put all the Artist folders in the Brennan Transfer folder.  Most of the time we just call that folder 'music'.

So it would be music\Artist\Album\tracks

[PMB]

Hi mrjacob,

The first diagram on the 'Organising your music' page - link - explains the required folder and file structure.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[derek Jacob]

Thanks Chaps

So I’ve 

1) deleted the contents of the memory stick (or so I thought - some hidden remnants from Windows still apparent so I’m also now reformatting it (item 4 below)).

2) All artist names are at L1 (what I did before knowing the structure was ordering them as standalone albums - duh me!)

3) deleted the music on the BB1 (it would be neat on the unit to just delete an album but hey I’m sure the UI can do that)

4) popped the stick back in to find that whilst the music was there it had some of the original data still showing (a fact of using both Mac and Windows it seems)

5). Got a brand new stick and loaded up 4 albums - and they went in nicely but it seemed I still couldn’t see the artists. I decided to get over myself at that point!

6) happy it was working almost as I wanted I then loaded more to the new stick - note to self get the best transfer rate stick you can.

7) looked this morning and can see the artists now appearing - I don’t know if it was something I did as I played with some maintenance functions or the BB1 (which Ive now decided to call ‘Bob’) just settling itself down.

The next step is to load the ‘Compilations’ folder; iTunes of course groups albums into the compilations when its a mix of a variety of artists. Am I right to think this might not work too well?

All told I’m in a happy place apart from copying to USB stick self imposed issue

Ive even looked at splashing out to get another Bose speaker just for Bob :)

Kind regards to all 

[derek Jacob]

Update - so based on the naming conventions explained above I don't seem to be able to show the artists on (for instance) a soundtrack album where the source (iTunes) has the album artist as various and yet the track artist is (for example) Nick Cave & the bad seeds. to comply I'm going to have to every compilation album And I have a lot) remove the compilation tag, remove the album artist tag and then reload all the music I've already loaded (I presume) to make sure it then populates the 'by artist' field. Or I just don't bother with showing the individual artists in my compilations.

I can't be the only one who has a lot of compilation albums from iTunes surely?  Any other suggestions? How about a subroutine to upload compilations and keep the integrity?

[Daniel Taylor]

For Brennan use only, you don't have to do anything with the tags.  The Brennan looks only at the top level folder for the Artist name, the 2nd level folder for the Album name, and then the tracks must be in the Album folder.

You can have an Artist folder named "Various Artists."  But that would probably mean that you'd have a truck load of albums under that Artist.  You can name that Artist folder anything you want that makes sense to you and will help you know what you've got.  Same with the Album folder, or even the track names.  Just understand that the Brennan units interpret those names the way they do.

[PMB]

Hi D,

I think the BB1 'scanned' it's memory on powering up and so Artist names were displayed. After uploading a batch of Artists or Albums try running Scan Disk (Maintenance menu) to rebuild the internal database the BB1 uses to locate, display and play music.

I assume you would like to see the Artist for each Track on the compilation whereas the B2 groups all Tracks under 'Various'. The only way around this would be to manually edit each Track name to add the Artist.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[derek Jacob]

Thanks Paul

Ive resorted to being creative on the various artist compilations and accepting that I cant see the artist or search by them.

I genuinely think for someone like me who wants an audio jukebox this is a significant limitation. As Ive said before I would suspect that the majority of digital music is taken from Apples iTunes. I almost feel it should be an easy fix.... but what do I know as I’m not a programmer. 

Derek