ITunes Synchronization

[Steven]

How do I get new songs into iTunes

Hi,

I am reposting because I have not figured this out....

I have a lot of songs in iTunes already. I installed Conductor, and it went to copy everything into my iTunes library. Well, most of my music is there. I only want to add incrementally, since I bought K. Is that at all possible?

It looks like it wants to either download everything, or it wants to download nothing.

Thanks, Steven

 

[TivoSloth]

Steven:

If I understand correctly, you have, for example, 500 albums and other songs in Itunes. You also have have those same albums loaded into K already. From this point forward, you want to import newly purchased albums into K and have K push those albums into Itunes using Conductor. This process will relieve you of having to import the album twice, once into K and the second time into Itunes via your computer CD-ROM drive.

If that description is close to what you want to achieve, you may need to add one step to make it work. As I understand Conductor, you have 3 choices of what to import into Itunes from K: import all songs from K, import no songs from K, import songs from from K that are in a particular music collection. The trick is that the music collection is a user defined collection. This essentially excludes importing music in the music collection tabs New, Mix Albums, Genres, Classical Works etc.

There are workarounds to this limitation though. There are certain ways to automatically add songs to a user-defined collection. In my setup, I have three user-defined collections: Jay, Emily, and Ipod. For iTunes I can sync any of those 3 at any point and K will essentially process and import whatever is in those 3 collections when that collection is selected from the Conductor options screen, while still removing songs from a previously selected user-defined collection.

With that in mind, there is no way, yet, to have a user-defined collection include any new albums automatically. Although music collections can automatically add new albums that appear in a genre or in a mix album, there's no "add to collection" selection box on the "new" tab for the video interface in K Music Collections. This is likely because the "New" category is dynamic and albums appear in that category for a fixed period of time set by the user.

A simple option is to define a collection with the name of something like "Ipod" or "iTunes." This will initially be blank. You can then add albums to that collection as they are imported into K. Once the album is imported into K, you can add new albums into the "iTunes" collection in two ways from the user web interface. From the music tab you can drag albums from the "New Albums" drop down list into the "iTunes" collection. Or, and probably much simpler, you can select new albums from the "Import" tab from the user web interface, click on the new album, and then use the drop down fields to select the newly created "iTunes" field and then click the "Add to Collections" link which then adds the album to the selected user-defined collection (one of the My Collections labeled collections).

For each album you'll have two clicks once on the Import screen of the user web interface. One to select the album, the second to choose the collection, the third to add the particular album to the collection. The import chronology on the Import screen is probably the easiest method as you add albums from time to time. Conductor, working with Itunes, will take care of the rest and the albums will be Itunes when you look to sync.

I hope that gets you started in the right direction.

Jay

 

[rgbyhkr]

Second - Sound Quality. If you are purchasing music from the iTunes store it is encoded at 256kb at the HIGHEST and it can be as low as 128kb.

Just to update, I think with the move to all DRM-free, all tracks in ITMS are now 256 AAC.

I advise all my clients who are interested in Kaleidescape system for multi-zone audio NOT to purchase a Kaleidescape system if their music collection consists mainly of low BR music bought from stores like iTunes and not from a CD collection.

This is certainly a preference, but in general I would agree. That is, unless your music listening is non-critical. Really, if you are just having music playing in the background on less than high-end equipment (I know, another subjective aspect), then you will likely not notice the difference, especially at bitrates of 256. I have to believe that we'll see K add 2-way importing of music back into K from your computer (or streaming, though importing seems more likely) sometime soon. This would be especially meaningful now that ITMS, Amazon, etc are all DRM free, so problems with DRM licenses aren't an issue. Sure, the audio quality isn't as good, but they can't ignore the popularity of services like this. I have to think that quite a few K owners are not critical music listeners and, as such, have no problem with compressed downloads.

There are other multi-zone audio solutions, which are less expensive then the Kaleidescape, designed for iPod/iTunes integration.

Absolutely true. I have used quite a few of them including AirTunes through Airport Express, Sonos, Roku, Squeezebox, etc. For users who use iTunes as their primary music manager, these solutions let you easily extend that management to other zones of the house.

With that said, if you do like to purchase your music online I HIGHLY suggest Music Giants. They sell lossless,downloadable music . I have purchased complete albums from Music Giants which delivers music in VERY HIGH WMA bit rate files, burned the album onto a CD and imported it into Kaleidescape. Just like a regular CD artist information and cover art is loaded from AMG into Kaleidescape.

Again, I HIGHLY suggest that, if you like to purchase music electronically then do it through Music Giants and stay away from services like the iTunes Music Store which sells at very low bit rates. You will end up with a much more enjoyable music listening experience with your Kaleidescape system.

My 2 cents.

These lossless services are thankfully growing, but are still pretty limited in catalog selection. I've bought quite a bit of music from MG, but I'd readily admit that their collection is far smaller than ITMS, Amazon, Rhapsody, etc. There are other services, some of which are Mac friendly (I've used HDTracks.com). There is a great site I frequent called Computer Audiophile that talks about music servers, high quality download services, etc. They have a section on such download services, some of which offer higher than CD quality downloads, which you can find here:

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/taxonomy_menu/4/19

Jeff

 

[rgbyhkr]

We only have Macs here in the office and at home. We run boot camp and with Vista Ultimate. Thus able to use Music Giants.

For reference, I'm pretty sure you can also do the same with Parallels or VM Ware on a Mac to buy MG content using IE.

AIFF files are as near to CD quality as you can get.

I hate to nitpick here, but I don't see how AIFF (or WAV) is not exactly CD quality, vs near CD quality.

I have imported a few CD's using Apple Lossless but I do not get as high a bit rate file and I do notice a difference in sound. Most people will not hear a difference because of my "other" job (see next paragraph) I notice it. Especially in the studio.

ALAC, FLAC, WMA Lossless, etc are going to be fine for the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of people. In fact, I would discourage people from looking for the difference as the psychological effect is far stronger than any actual difference between the 2 files. The savings in storage space (takes only about half the space for lossless files vs native WAV/AIFF) is well worth it.

Jeff

 

[mrmckay]

It was mentioned in an earlier post that Conductor might actually become 2-way now that the DRM has been eliminated. Has anyone heard anything from Kaleidescape on this?

Regards,
Chris

 

[Jmca1]

On the hearing anything from K-Scape, has anyone heard if, when they update KScape, they will allow it to run natively in OSX? I really don't want to have to run VMWare or Parallels to get iTunes sync to work on my Powerbook.

 

[Jmca1]

KScape was supposed to be Conductor... sorry