Could someone help me with a question? Using itunes, what is the method for creating folders so that I don't have to seek through 100 songs, but instead can seek to the folder/album I want. Thanks.

 

I haven't tested this completely, but it seems to build the folder structure based on which column you are sorting the playlist by. If you sort it by Artist, it will maintain the Artist\Album\Song structure. This is what I do usally, so I know it works. If you sort the playlist any other way, it puts all the songs in the root directory.

The only annoyance with the A\A\S folder setup is that the Shaker reads the track numbers sequentially across the whole disc... so, track 2 on the 4th album will be called track 51 on the display. This is another reason to have the track number in the filename.

 

I discovered a peculiarity whilst trying to get mine to read the disc correctly. I discovered that none of my tracks were displayin info correctly, except for one CD I ripped and several that I bought through iTunes. All my CDs were ripped with iTunes yet there was no commonality with the tag reads.

Bottom line, my Jan 06 car will read V2 tags only. iTunes encodes the tags with spaces between the data and the label, ie "Song Name TRK". The shaker must have no space in between, ie "Song NameTRK". V1 tags are of no use either no matter what.

Here's an example of the exact same song, ripped with iTunes. The data on top has spaces put in by iTunes with ID3v2.2. This data was not read by the Shaker. The bottom data was rewritten simply by saving the tag with no alterations using Tag&Rename with ID3v2.3. This is read just fine, every time.



I tried following the tutorial you created odiaz, but when I tried to strip the tags with mp3tag it would encode both V1 and V2 info. I could not get it to strip the V2 regardless of what settings I used. When I used Tag&Rename to remove the V2 data the files were not read properly by the Shaker, and I can't tell why 'cos the data is not encoded in plain text in the header like the V2 data.

So, ID3v2 only for me. Anyone else? I will pull the deck when I get a chance and get the serial, build date or whatever info might be useful.


Incidentally, this was all verified by 10hrs, 12 CD-Rs and 2 CD-RWs worth of testing, so I didn't jump to any conclusions.