2.) As a long time iTunes user syncing playlists, how does one transfer audio to the X5? Videos im seeing are people manually dragging folders. Not sure if im overly keen on that.
3.) If I get the X5 I can see ill be reripping lots of my audio into FLAC. For ultimate compatibility im sure ill keep my 320 AAC/MP3 collection which is about 80GB in size. Are there any tips for maintaining multiple collections? Which feeds into how people sync to the X5. Maintaining a collection means I can keep using iTunes and then copy to X5 in some other form. Or is there another piece of software people like using instead of iTunes?
Thanks
Musicbee is the answer to both these.
Well, technically, Mediamonkey can do it as well, but I had too many problems with it crashing when transferring files. Add in some weirdness when dealing with high bitrate files and a more annoying 'tag from web' interface (it's limited to the amazon store, whereas the bee looks at multiple sources) and the PITA switching between speakers/DACs and it's just not as good. (that said, the manual tagging/renaming tools are powerful)
My setup is I have all of my music mirrored on a server, plus sitting on a local HDD under two separate folders (/incoming for recent purchases/acquisitions, then moved to /lib when tagged properly). Music then gets pushed to my X5 as either flac or -V0, with the target card depending on genre (which, for me, falls into one of six broad styles of music).
Plus an iTunes library of everything on the server in -v0 for Airplay and pushing to my phone, but that's pretty much obsolete and probably going to go at some point because Airplay is flaky as hell and not worth the headache.
Once you get Musicbee set up, it can handle that entire workflow. It will autoscan all the directories, rip discs to flac (with accuraterip/libflac), let me tag/add art/add lyrics to anything the /incoming folder, move it to
/lib/<genre>/<artist>/<year> - <album>/<track> - <title>, mirror that to the server, copy flac or transcode with lame to the appropriate card. Sorted.
Plus it will switch my output between speakers, either of my DACs or my bluetooth portable that comes outside with me (on the rare occasions I actually push myself into working out). And act as a uPnP/dlna server to stream to the speakers in my kitchen. And maintain a couple of playlists for me (new stuff I want to listen to, a 'new album every week' playlist, favorite tracks, workout music, dinner music, etc).
Trying to do that just in the windows interface would be painful, and involve using a bunch of tools - musicbrainz/mp3tag to auto/manual tag, chrome to d/l art that didn't autotag and lyrics, a couple of explorer windows (5, to be exact), dbpoweramp for conversions, EAC for ripping... and then something to actually play music. Dealing with ~80k tracks.... I don't miss the iRiver h140 'do everything via drag and drop' days at all
It's definitely got some issues to work out - DSD (DoP) playback was only just added and needs work, streaming can be spotty (but that's usually hardware annoyances), and the skinning isn't as flexible as others. But still, it's the best option
for me atm.