Synchronising my MP3 player with my PC's hard drive

[Droopy Dick]

I have an iRiver iHP-140 MP3 player with FM radio.

It has a 40GB hard drive, so can swallow every one of my CDs, even ripped at a high sampling rate.

Since I bought the toy last summer, I've acquired a fair few new CDs. These have been ripped to my PC's hard disk.

My problem is in transferring the new CDs music files from my PC to my |iRiver.

Apart from laboriously copying folder and after folder (or directory to those of us who grew up on proper computers!), can anyone suggest a way of automatically updating the iRiver such that ONLY the new files are copied across?

I don't really want to block copy the whole lot across, overwriting existing files.

WinXP seems very unfriendly in this respect. (How I long for Windoze 3.1 File Manager, or even the old PCTools. In fact, Windows Explorer is a pack of cr*p.

 

[Cheesy Mike]

MusicMatch Jukebox (MMJB) is a fine piece of free software that should manage your MP3 library and synchronise the PC to the MP3 player. It doesn't explicitly support the iRiver but I can't imagine it will be a problem. There is also a paid-for version of the software - MMJB Plus - which has extra features like tagging files from the filename or online lookup of the files to automatically insert the album art.

www.musicmatch.com

Mike

 

[xpi0t0s]

I don't know exactly how it works because I haven't got one, but if the MP3 player appears as an extra drive like my USB stick does when plugged in, you could use the files' A flag (archive) and the DOS command XCOPY. The /M flag for XCOPY identifies files that have the A flag set, copies only those files, then resets the A flag.

So if your files are in c:\music, the MP3 player appears to the system as drive X:, and you have the following files, with flags shown:

---- c:\music\file1.mp3
---- c:\music\file2.mp3
--A- c:\music\file3.mp3
--A- c:\music\file4.mp3

then the following command, run in a DOS box in the c:\music folder, will copy just file3.mp3 and file4.mp3:

xcopy *.mp3 x: /m

After this, if you run the exact same xcopy command again, and nothing has changed on c:, then the command will do nothing (because no files have the A flag set)

If you have a directory structure, add the /S option to XCOPY.

If you have a directory structure on C: but have to have a flat structure on X, I don't think XCOPY will do this, but there's a utility called XXCOPY that you can download, which will do everything you could possibly want with files and a whole heap besides.

If you decide to use (X)XCOPY but don't want to copy existing music, use the ATTRIB command to modify the current files' flags. WARNING: only do this on music. If you try to do this over the whole c: drive, Windows will get its knickers in a twist and assume you've modified important system files (it did last time I tried that, and iirc I had to reinstall the poxy pile of crap).

For detailed help on these commands, open a DOS box and type
xcopy /?
attrib /?

To change folders use the cd command, and to switch drives just issue the drive letter and : as a command, so if the DOS box opens in c:\ and your music is in d:\music, run these commands before the xcopy:

d:
cd \music


Alternatively, if the copying process happens without the software asking you stupid questions every five minutes, you could just set the copy off before you go to bed.

 

[DCoplin]

If you're running XP, upgrade to Windows Media Player v10 - that supports syncing to mobile MP3 players. (To upgrade just go to the Windows Update page)

Basically you can create a playlist (synclist) that then syncs to your device, as you change the list, the next time you connect in it will update with the changes.

Cheers

Dave

 

[Droopy Dick]

Thanks for the advice.

I tried the MusicMatch site but I was unable to see any way to d/load the free version of the program.

I spent a happy hour on Monday writing a small DOS batch p[rograms to use the Xcopy route. It worked OK.

Even better, I just installed WMP 10 and tried the Synch command. Very impressive and very simple.