Author Topic: iPod & iPhone Driver  (Read 10352 times)

boroda

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 4595
Original topic had been accidentally deleted. Its new topic.

Plugin status: discontinued, unsupported now.

NOTE: Plugin had been tested with iTunes 9 and probably won't work with higher versions of iTunes. You can download iTunes 9 from oldapps.com.

Full description and download link
Last Edit: August 15, 2022, 04:22:51 PM by boroda

guijo

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 10
Still works with iTunes 12.8... But it requires expert hands and a very clean music managemetn workflow to navigate between its bugs.

Mirage

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 2
How do I get iTunes library to frequently update it's library after modifying my MusicBee Library such as adding and deleting songs and such without having to go through the whole process of re-copying the entirety of the library with this plugin? Much appreciate any possible solutions.


Jirachi

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 5
Does this still work or is there an alternative? I keep trying to sync and every time that I think it's going to work, the MusicBee icon turns from green to red and it freezes for a bit and it says the sync was aborted!
Last Edit: July 26, 2019, 02:22:58 AM by Jirachi

boroda

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 4595
last time i tried to use this plugin (several years ago) all worked fine. not sure how it works now though.

guijo

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 10
I can still get it to work as of today, still a pain in the a** to use, and haven't found any alternative so far (though I read somewhere about syncing Musicbee and MediaMonkey)...

amp

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 11
I've had catastrophic disasters with music libraries handled under iTunes,  dropped it years ago. Musicbee is hands down the best music library, if not foobar2000. Not an Apple user but iPod is the only device I like to use but I dread installing iTunes just so that I can use Rockbox. I do not use the iPod plugin because it force involves the use of iTunes. What I do is open the latest itunes.exe using 7zip and only extract and install the iTunes64.msi and AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi for lean bare bones support for iPod USB connections to restore the iPod.

Because Musicbee has a unstable connection under a Rockbox USB music sync, where the connection drops every few minutes while syncing; what I do is uninstall Rockbox bootloader (not delete .rockbox folder) reset iPod by holding Menu + Center, and immediately before the Apple logo appears, turn the hold switch on, and the iPod reboots back to normal default "white" interface, sync the iPod under Musicbee as regular flash drive connection to /Music folder, and then install Rockbox bootloader back reset iPod again normally without the hold switch to boot back to Rockbox, all while leaving the internal drive /Music untouched. The USB connection sync stability is flawless under the regular iPod interface as "flash drive", but once you have your full library in sync, one could go back to Rockbox and sync the occasional minor sync. Syncing the occasional song or album under Rockbox should be quick, if the connection drops, just hard reset back to Rockbox and connect again (hold Menu + Center). None of the "flash drive" sync music will appear under the iPod default interface, for that you'd have to use and turn on the plugin, make sure all the iTunes settings are set and then sync as described in the plugins instructions page: https://www.getmusicbee.com/addons/plugins/48/ipod-amp-iphone-driver/
Last Edit: February 05, 2021, 09:22:38 PM by amp

phred

  • Global Moderator
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 9301
Understand that this plugin was discontinued as of August 2018, so there is no longer any support for it. Therefore use at your own risk.

In addition, the developer of this plugin hasn't been on the forum since May 2020.
Download the latest MusicBee v3.5 or 3.6 patch from here.
Unzip into your MusicBee directory and overwrite existing files.

----------
The FAQ
The Wiki
Posting screenshots is here
Searching the forum with Google is  here

BoringName

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 201
Hmm, take two. I typed all this out in the quick reply box and it just disappeared when I clicked post.

I'm currently updating this plugin and I have 2 questions for now.

1. How are ratings stored?

It appears iTunes stores ratings from 0-100 where 20 is 1 star, 40 is 2 stars etc...
It appears MusicBee stores ratings from 1 to 5. Are half stars stored as 1.5, 2.5 etc...? I guess I could test that myself, I have half stars disabled at the moment.

This plugin was just copying the ratings straight from MB to iTunes and it seems iTunes just ignores single digit ratings (keeps it's current value) and doesn't give an error or anything to let you know it failed to update.
I just need confirmation because if I am right, this addon never updated ratings to iTunes and nobody noticed which I find hard to believe. I thought it may have been due changes in how ratings are stored but iTunes have been using 0-100 as far back as 2002 from what google tells me. Did MB use a 0-100 scale in the past?

2. What's the etiquette when modifying someone elses plugin and making it available to everyone else? It's completely based on Boroda's source code and no way I could have done it from scratch. But I have modified the code quite a bit and I think anyone still rocking an iPod will like the changes I have made, especially if they have a large library.

edit: Whoops, forgot I had a 3rd question.

What's the criteria for Plugin.MbApiInterface.Sync_FileStart() to return a re-encoded file? Looking at the original file and the new one, they were both the same bitrate and format so I don't know why it needed to be re-encoded.

I have all the encoding options unticked but MB re-encoded 1% of my library to a temp folder and sent them to iTunes with this temp folder location as the file location.
Last Edit: June 06, 2022, 12:00:28 AM by BoringName

phred

  • Global Moderator
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 9301
2. What's the etiquette when modifying someone elses plugin and making it available to everyone else? It's completely based on Boroda's source code and no way I could have done it from scratch. But I have modified the code quite a bit and I think anyone still rocking an iPod will like the changes I have made, especially if they have a large library.
Common etiquette is to discuss it with the original developer of the plugin. Boroda seems to appear on the fourm every three or four months and it looks like he was online today. I suggest a PM to him and hope for an answer.

If you don't hear back in a reasonable amount of time, since the source code is readily available and not restricted, publish it but by all means, credit boroda both in the code and in the description in the forum when you publish it. I would think you should start a new topic for the new (revised) plugin, but reference it here with a description and a link.
Download the latest MusicBee v3.5 or 3.6 patch from here.
Unzip into your MusicBee directory and overwrite existing files.

----------
The FAQ
The Wiki
Posting screenshots is here
Searching the forum with Google is  here

BoringName

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 201
2. What's the etiquette when modifying someone elses plugin and making it available to everyone else? It's completely based on Boroda's source code and no way I could have done it from scratch. But I have modified the code quite a bit and I think anyone still rocking an iPod will like the changes I have made, especially if they have a large library.
Common etiquette is to discuss it with the original developer of the plugin. Boroda seems to appear on the fourm every three or four months and it looks like he was online today. I suggest a PM to him and hope for an answer.

I'll give that a crack when I've finished. I'm pretty much done except for the query above about Sync_FileStart()

Is there a better place to ask or do I just have to hope Steven sees this eventually? I understand he doesn't spend all day on the forums. I just want to make sure I'm posting in the right place. I'll give some more info anyway so he knows what I'm talking about.

In the orginal code for this plugin, Sync_FileStart() and Sync_FileEnd() bookend the code that does all the sync work. From what I can gather, it's how the plugin sends the file to Musicbee to perform any conversions and display info to the user about the sync progress.

The issue is sometimes Sync_FileStart() returns a converted file when I have all the conversion options unticked. Also some of the files getting converted were ripped from CD with MusicBee and encoded with MusicBee's default encoder settings so I don't understand why it would think they need to be re-encoded at Sync time.

For now I have bypassed those 2 commands and just use MB_SetBackgroundTaskMessage to inform the user of the sync progress. It works fine but it means the user can't use the conversion options in MB and it also doesn't display a summary if a file fails to copy over at the end.

The files that previously got converted synced perfectly fine with iTunes in their original form so the conversion was unnecessary.

One other issue is it also doesn't display the correct counter at the top of the sync window when it's running. eg) instead of saying "35 of 36000 songs", it says "35 of No songs".

Personally I'm fine with how I have the plugin now because I won't be using the conversion options, but I figured if there was a bug it was worth looking into and other users might appreciate it.

Thanks.

boroda

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 4595
@BoringName, "unneeded" conversion may be caused due to embedding artworks to music files when syncing (iTunes supports embedded artworks only). i don't have itunes installed on my pc now, so plugin don't work for me at all, but as far as i remember you can disable artwork syncing in plugin's virtual device properties.

p.s. feel free to fork this plugin under any license you want. my license is "do all you want with plugin binary and source code at your own risk". also feel free to ask any questions about plugin source code, but keep in mind that i haven't been looking at it for several years.
Last Edit: June 10, 2022, 08:09:33 AM by boroda

BoringName

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 201
@BoringName, "unneeded" conversion may be caused due to embedding artworks to music files when syncing (iTunes supports embedded artworks only). i don't have itunes installed on my pc now, so plugin don't work for me at all, but as far as i remember you can disable artwork syncing in plugin's virtual device properties.

So not thinking about the implications, I set it to not send artwork and did a sync. About an hour later I got a system message that main OS drive was full..... it was re-encoding everything that had embedded artwork to strip it out....whoops.

So I deleted those and fired up the Album Artwork Manager (this thing is fantastic) and found a few hundred songs without embedded artwork, fixed those up and did another sync resulting in zero re-encodes. I had done a search for songs missing artwork but they hadn't showed up because there was a cover.jpg in their folder. I set storage preferences to embedded and then used the "Does not match storage preferences" option.

Thanks. I'll probably just post it up as "iPod & iPhone Driver 2.0" or something equally unimaginative.

Probably not much demand for it these days anyway, I've had to do a lot of maintenance on my partners iPod to keep it running, the only original part is the click wheel and case. There probably isn't many people still running them. Although this should work for iPhones too.

Bjork77

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 19
I might only speak for myself, but I've been having a lot of trouble trying to get my 7th gen ipod classic to sync with musicbee. Needless to say I nearly jumped outta my seat when I saw this thread was revived after so long, especially since I bought this less than a month ago. So thank you both for the work you've done on this plugin.