Custom iPod metadata?

[ZPrime]

This is a feature that I've only found in one place, and that is the foo_pod add-in for foobar2000. At first glance it sounds like a feature you'd never use, but once you start playing with it it is incredibly powerful.

It has two options, pre-entered mode and "generic."

In pre-entered mode, you define a specific tag "header." For instance, "POD_". Any metadata from a file that begins with POD_ is attached to the corresponding tag in the iPod. So, if you have an "Album" tag of "really really long proper name for the album", but you want it shorter when it's put on a small screen (like an iPod), you can pre-enter that shortened name in a custom tag on the file called "POD_ALBUM." When the file is transcoded from your library (presumably starting in lossless, but it works however you do), the system adds that tag information into the iTunesDB on the iPod. This information is IN PLACE OF whatever you have in your normal "ALBUM" tag, so if you want you could have an album show up as a totally different thing on the iPod.

The alternative system, that I'm calling "generic" mode, works well in another specific situation. I personally tend to listen to entire albums at once. I generally navigate to Artist first, then find the Album I want. I never remember the name of albums; I do tend to remember if the song I want came from "their first album" or "a current one" or whatever. The iPod has ZERO way to show you the release year of an album though. Solution? There's a field in foo_pod that allows you to set a variable-based tag to enter in the iPod. So my field for "ALBUM" reads: %date% - %album%. When my music is loaded to the iPod, the date (year) of album release is prepended to the "Album" metadata on the device, so when I go through the list of albums by Artist, they're sorted by release year. Again, the data from the "generic" mode tag takes over what you'd normally have from "ALBUM." By default, the system has the same thing in each tag - %album% for the album tag, %artist% for artist, etc. You can customize it as you like though, and this takes place with any music you sync to the iPod.

It seems very complex, but it's quite easy to use, and IMHO is an EXCELLENT feature for those who are a bit anal-retentive about how they organize their music.

One other cool part -- any of this custom information that is sent to the iPod is NOT dumped into the tags on the files themselves. The tags on the files stay identical to the source. So, with foobar I can transcode a bunch of stuff from FLAC to MP3 for the iPod. The extra iPod-only info gets encoded into the database for the iPod, so scrolling through menus shows that info. If I go into the filesystem of the iPod and open one of the mp3s with Winamp or any other player, the tags are "normal," just like the original source.

If you have an iPod that will support full folder names (I guess some of the newer firmwares don't like it?), you can basically copy your entire folder structure to the ipod, issue an "update database" command, and then not only do you have music portable, but if you want to pull a few mp3s off to share with a buddy, you can just dig through the folder structure to find it.

Right now, this is the biggest thing keeping me from moving to MediaMonkey for all of my music management... I really like having my albums sorted by year, and I don't want to mangle the "album" field in everything in my library just to do so.

[Lowlander]

I don't think this is really useful if it's not a standard that works with other software. As it seems a DB value that would mean that it only works with MediaMonkey. It also should work with other players as well.

An option to limit fields to a set ammount of characters when synchronizing to a portable device seems to make more sense and a lot less work. I assume that very few people would actually really use a feature like this.