KEAOS v3.5 - Details on iTunes integration ("Kaleidescape Conductor")

[josh]

The most anticipated feature of v3.5 is the integreation of Kaleidescape's music system with any Windows-based PC's running iTunes. I have no details on if or when the company will support Mac versions of iTunes.

Kaleidescape Conductor is a Windows application that keeps all (or a part of) your music collection in Kaleidescape synced to iTunes. It is important to note that this isn't 2-way synchronization, it's a one-way path... music in Kaleidescape is available in iTunes but you can not import music into Kaleidescape that you may have in iTunes.

While it is one-way, it's a true synchronization, not an "export" function. (An export implies that once you do it, the connection is broken until you do it again.) Conductor really does keep your iTunes synchronized to Kaleidescape. Make a change in Kaleidescape to your collection, or to a playlist, or add music, and you'll see it in your iTunes in minutes. Delete tracks in Kaleidescape, they're gone from iTunes also. Slick.

OK, so how is it all installed and configured?

INSTALLING CONDUCTOR:

Couldn't be easier - you're actually connecting to your Kscape server and downloading the installer from there. You'll find a link in your web utility on the main screen as well as on the music screen. Click the link, and the software is downloaded to your PC for you to install.

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Initial Setup:

Once installed, you'll configure your options in the following two screens:

and then... you wait. And wait. And WAIT... in my case, for about 3 days. And that's for a pretty small music collection - (400 CDs or 5000 songs in my Kaleidescape collection) It's not a huge deal as it just runs in the background and didn't seem to severely impact my PC performance as it did the transcoding. (And of course Kaleidescape functioned just fine during that time.)

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So the server and your PC start doing their thing, creating MP3 files on your PC for iTunes to recognize, AND automatically notifying iTunes of the content.

Of course in typical Kaleidescape elegant fashion, everything was seamless... you don't need to tell iTunes anything, (Conductor registers the songs into iTunes via some registration or API function), the songs just start appearing in iTunes. And of course ALL the metadata is there, including Cover Art! nice.

As a little bonus, you now have MP3s of all your music tracks. You can do whatever you like with them... (only complaint is that the names of the files are gibberish rather than nice human-readable form, but the directory structure is readable as album and artist name. Just not the tracks themselves, a minor inconvenience that we hear Kaleidescape is fixing.)

From then on, you'll notice a cool little Kaleidescape icon in your system tray:

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It can be double-clicked at any time to check on the importing process or change your settings, or just see the status of Conductor. It should ALWAYS be running to keep your iTunes in sync.

As you see in the options screens, you can select from various sound qualities. The interface doesn't tell you the actual bit rates for each available sound quality, but here's what you're looking for:

• "Superior Sound" is 320kbps (vbr)
• "Balanced Sound" is 192kbps (vbr)
• "Smaller Files" is 128kbps (vbr)

You can even go back and change the quality setting later. Conductor will just dutifully start re-transcoding the files for you and several days later your music collection will be upgraded or downgraded over time.

The whole thing is remarkably easy to use - you set it and forget it. iTunes will just always be up to date... Conductor will keep doing its thing quietly in the background.

iTunes will now have all your music added in, and you'll even have your PLAYLISTS from Kaleidescape brought over and converted to iTunes Playlists.

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Notice above there's a new Kaleidescape folder in the Playlists section of iTunes and all your Playlists are converted over. In order!

In summary, this is an outstanding integration by Kaleidescape. Like all their efforts, the interface is incredibly simple, the results and the usability are great. It's amazing to just always have my ipods up-to-date as we add music to our Kaleidescape.

Feel free to ask any questions and I'll try to answer it or get someone who knows the answer.

--josh

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[josh]

Oh, in answer to the question I know you're all going to ask.

I don't know when this software will actually be released for users. But if past beta cycles are an indication, it's usually around a month from the end of the beta period (today). Will let you know if I hear more.

--josh

 

[AC88]

This is excellent stuff!

With over 1,000 CDs in my system and growing though... I don't want to replicate all of them into my PC... So, how comprehensive will the "Music from Collection" capability be? Would I be able to manually select which albums to sync onto the PC, and alter that collection freely/periodcally?

And what is the purpose of "None of my Music"... why would someone want to use Conductor, but sync none of their music?

 

[josh]

It's very simple and comprehensive. With 3.5 you have music collections, just like we've always had for movies. It's slightly different than a mix list... collections hold whole CDs only.

You would set up a collection like "For Dad's iPod", and add the albums you want to that collection. Collector would only bring over music in that collection instead of your whole library. You use the web interface to drag the album names into that collection - it's very easy.

hope that helps,
--josh

 

[Croptop]

If you want single tracks (or multiple tracks but not the entire album) in a Music Collection, you can create a mix album with those tracks and then put the Mix Album into the Collection.

In addition to the web interface, you can add albums to your collection via the on screen display. When you bring up the album detail, you'll notice a new menu entry called "Add to Collection".

 

[JerryL]

very cool!

 

[avplanet]

Music Collections are super-cool, you can also add an artist or genre to a music collection. I created a collection called "Sync with iTunes". I then added the genre "Soundtrack" to my collection via the movie player. Conductor sync'd all my soundtracks, I purchased the soundtrack to "Little Miss Sunshine" after the fact, imported it on my music player and it automatically was sync'd via conductor because it is part of the "Soundtrack Genre" I didn't have to manually go in and add it to the collection. Like I said, super-cool.

 

[josh]

Great points - as others have pointed out, the new Music Collections can do far more than I initially thought. And it makes them a completely different thing than the Movie Collections.

 

[iansilv]

does it support apple lossless?

 

[ejfiii]

does it support apple lossless?

let me handle this one. It doesn't handle AAC since the music is ONLY going FROM the Kscape server to ITunes. You HAVE to burn the music to the SERVER and then it will sync with Itunes.

I hate to be that one guy at the party that ruins it for everyone, but I have to speak up. KSCAPE knows my opinion on this too so if they read this I'm not too concerned. In my experience and knowledge inside and out of our industry I cannot think of one person I know (including clients, friends and family) who would get ANY use out of this feature. Every person I know who uses ITunes already has an Ipod or five and a ton of music in iTunes. So this one way synchronization would be worthless to them as it would be to me.

Sure, going forward they could burn a bought CD onto the kscape and the music will appear in their itunes, but what about all the music already in ITunes. I have one client who we just finished up a HUGE system for that has 38,000 songs in ITunes. It is impossible for him to use KSCAPE for music so he got a ARQ with Netsync and after about 4 weeks all his songs in itunes were synched to his music server with two versions - high bitrate for the server and low for itunes - INCLUDING PURCHASED AAC ENCRYPTED SONGS FROM ITUNES STORE.

I am the biggest KSCAPE supporter there is in our industry and will continue to do so going forward. My only hope is that this one way sync with iTunes is a science project first attempt at them writing an iTunes interface and we will eventually see two way integration. Until then KSCAPE music is only for certain few clients who have music on store bought CDs (finishing up one of those installs now).

Don't bother pointing out the pitfalls of going from iTunes to server - I know them all. But Kscape should have the engineering muscle to make it happen in their typical simple way. If ARQ can do it with much fewer resources, my fingers are crossed that KScape can too.

Sorry to be the downer, but I had to say something from the other side of the fence.

Cheers all,

 

[rgbyhkr]

You're not the only one as I know for a fact that K hears this a lot. I feel pretty confident that we'll see K add this eventually. Importing existing digital music collections into the K is something I talked to K about before music was even added as a feature. I've always looked at my system as a movies server with music tacked on as a bonus. But, my feeling is that since they do the movie side so well, they should be doing the same for music. In that way, importing existing music libraries is a must have.

The holdup is likely a matter of wanting to do it in a way that is extremely reliable and preserves the user experience. I expect that when it does come, it will be similar to what we have now with Conductor - background syncs from computer to the K with very little intervention or action required by the user once it is installed and running. My personal feeling is that it will also be fairly basic to preserve the user experience even if that means less overall functionality. The lack of import support is one major reason why I don't use K for music - Sonos has me covered there.

Here's some questions and thoughts about how it may play out:

- What formats will they support? MP3 is a no-brainer and WAV/AIFF seems likely given how they direct rip now. The question is what else, if anything? Given that iTunes is the player of choice, you may see AAC support as well - perhaps even ALAC. I don't expect WMA, OGG, APE and while unfortunate, probably not FLAC either.

- DRM'd versions will not be supported. DRM-stripped versions will be, but I don't think they will facilitate automatic transcoding like ReQuest does. That requires a reliance on a 3rd party app and K would likely rather not have to do that. I don't think they want to get into the business of developing those tools on their own, either. Beyond which, transcoding of low bitrate DRM content can lead to sound quality issues, and I don't think they want to "promote" that. They may suggest where users can go to do the conversions, but that's likely about it.

- I don't expect podcast import support. Sound quality is too low, no available metadata from AMG, user desirability for this is likely low, etc.

- I don't expect audible book support.

- I don't expect internet radio support. Between sound quality issues, spotty track data depending on the station, station streaming URL address changes, etc, I think it would be too much of dip in the user experience quality for them to go that route.

- I do expect playlist synching. The question here is how they will rectify or otherwise alert the user to missing tracks due to format incomparability. My Sonos system will "see" iTunes playlists, but will leave out AAC DRM songs in those lists (they don't show up on Sonos system rather than showing up and just getting skipped) because it can't play them back.

- How do they handle tracks that can't be identified? We have the manual entry system now via the Web UI, but this seems like a big PITA if you had a bunch of tracks to go through. I'm assuming that they will use AMG's "acoustic fingerprint" feature to identify imported tracks. I think I've read somewhere that it has a hit rate of ~85%. The question then is whether the unidentified tracks are actually in AMG's database but just can't be identified by the "acoustic fingerprint". If they are, just give users a way to select the album/track rather than manually entering all the metadata.

- I don't expect video importing.

I have no inside knowledge from K about any of the above, it's just my opinion based on what we have and have not seen from them in the past. I'd like to think that we'll see this sometime in 2008 given the desirability of the feature, but I had previously hoped for it in 2007 as well. Getting from K to iTunes is the first piece and that seems to be working well so hopefully they can focus on going back the other way.

Jeff

 

[talitha]

Shame

Nice, but not much help if (like me) you have around 200 gig of music on iTunes that you really want to add to KS so as to take advantage of the Remotescape app on the iPad. :-(