Just going over some old posts.
Don't use this plugin if you still use iTunes and have anything in iTunes of importance. This is a plugin for Musicbee that uses iTunes as an intermediary step to sync things from Musicbee to apple devices. It will completely overwrite anything that is currently in your iTunes library. It might leave songs in place but it will certainly delete all your playlists and create new ones to match Musicbee.
Just a few pointers -
If you delete a song in Musicbee or change it's file location, you should manually delete this from iTunes to prevent errors when it syncs to your device. There is no way to automate removing deleted files from iTunes without making every sync take as long as the initial sync, nobody wants that.
I used to think long path names caused issues with some songs syncing but I'm not sure that is the case, I've had songs not work where other songs with longer paths did. I think longer paths just give a higher chance to come up with a character combination iTunes doesn't like. Accented characters do have a higher chance to cause issues. I would recommend renaming any songs with accented characters to use standard. eg) change é to e
You probably need to accept the fact some songs just will not sync. Ive had 2 songs virtually identical to each other. Same bitrate, format and path length, no special characters in the name. One works and one doesn't, nothing would make it sync. It doesn't happen often, just something to be aware of.
The plugin will increment your play counts in Musicbee but set everything in iTunes to zero after a sync which goes back to the first sentence in this post.
It's probably better to just sync a couple of playlists instead of your entire library. The bigger the file count the higher the chance iTunes will have issues syncing a particular song.
If you have a big FLAC library, maybe consider converting them all the ALAC. That way the plugin won't have to spend time converting them all on the fly. When converting on the fly it has to create a temp file and if you are syncing a large library that could be a lot of unnecessary writes to your SSD.
Also, the iTunes Api is buggy as hell. I had to do a lot of workarounds just to get this thing to be functional and it's why I have the best version of itunes to use on the first page of this thread. These are issues that will never be fixed.
This is how I do a sync on my partners modified IPod Classic. She syncs her entire library to it so it's a big sync (39,000) songs.
- Turn the driver on in Music Bee
- After iTunes starts and it prompts to plugin the iPod I plug it in.
- At this point I wait a while as iTunes will sync with the iPod. I make sure it's finished syncing before I go to the next step.
- Start the sync in Music Bee
- If she's added a lot of music between syncs this can take a while as adding new songs is the slowest part of the process. (because the iTunes Api blows.)
- If there isn't much new music it takes about 20 minutes. That's reading the music off an NVME, it used to be a fair slower on a mechanical drive.
- If no errors popup, iTunes should do another sync with the iPod at the end of the process. I make sure that finishes, unplug the iPod and close everything down.
- If there is an error (which tends to happen more often now). This usually interrupts the importing of play counts and you have to wait quite a long time for the summary to pop up.
- I sort the iTunes library by play count. If any songs have more than 0 for a play count, I start the whole process again but click to work in offline mode and leave the iPod unplugged.
- After 20 minutes or so it will probably error again but once it's finished usually all the play counts have been synced. Otherwise back to step one for a third go....
It would be simpler to just remove the song causing issues from the sync but my partner wants ALL her music on there. I've also had some songs where the iTunes Api returned an error code that it failed to add the song but it did indeed add the song... did I mention how crap the iTunes Api is?
I might look at improving the error handling down the track but that's not going to be for quite a while.
