I have a smaller ipod than music collection, and I'd like to be able decide what goes on the ipod by just checking off albums in an application that will copy my 30gb of selected albums over automatically, so I don't have to drag every album individually onto their player. Does anybody use specialized software for this? Sketch, maybe? Lego?

Which media player are you using in Linux?

There are a ton of options, but in Amarok, you can right-click on an album and select 'transfer to device'. This is about the best I can offer.

As far as media players go, Amarok is by far my favorite.

I can't even think of a way to do this in a windows app. What were you using?

Can you control-mouseclick multiple albums, and then rightclick - copy?

you can in amarok

Hm, I haven't tried this in Amarok, I think because it's never really recognized my ipod (i'm running rockbox, which may be screwing with it).

To date I've just been copying stuff manually. I'm not using a windows app or anything.

So...try it. Control mouseclick the albums you want to put on the player, then drag it on to the player, just as you would one album. (I don't actually have an iPod, so I don't know how the interface works. I'm just guessing.)

Well, that's not what I want exactly. I want the application to keep track of which albums from my collection are on the player at any given time, so that when i want to take some off I uncheck them and when I want to put some on I check them. So I don't have to monitor what is and isn't on the player.

There's a tab in the amarok settings for devices. Since you're using Rockbox, you might be able to use a different device type, such as 'generic device'

This sound awesome. I'd love something like this. Who wants to program it for me so I can resell it and we can become rich?

Do you have an official link for Amarok?
Is it Windows compatible? (Or is there a similar windows compatible software that you guys use?)

Amarok's web page:
http://amarok.kde.org/

Alas, it does not run in windows...Linux only

Can't think of anything similar besides Itunes and Windows Media Player, which are nice enough, but not powerful enough to handle a database of 25000 songs....itunes especially

In Itunes, I did this by using an unused tagging field to put 'ipod album' in all of the albums I wanted to come across, then creating a smart playlist to transfer back and forth.

You could probably do the same thing with any linux audio player. Ultimately though, I'm not sure it would be any more convenient than drag and drop because most linux players will display the current contents of your mp3 player in some form.

I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for. Maybe if you rephrased your original question, I'd understand better. It sounds like you want an easy way to transfer albums to the mp3 player instead of transferring all of the individual songs. Is the problem that they aren't effectively organized in rockbox?

mugwump: rockbox's internal organization is fine. i can display files according to the directory structure (music/artist/album/file.mp3) or the id3 tags.

but when i rip a new album, i have to either open my ipod's music directory and my hard drive's music directory, drill down to the album (if i've already got albums from that artist), and drag over the album. OR, i have to have amarok rescan my collection to find the new album, then drag it to my media player (which i still can't get amarok to mount).

what i want: an application (standalone is fine) that keeps track of what's in my hard drive's music directory and my ipod's music directory. if an album/song is on both, there is a checkmark next to the album/song in the application's album list. if i reach my 30gb limit, i can uncheck some albums i don't need and check the new albums i want to add, and the app will do all of the copying and deleting.

in the end, the app is just cutting down on the dragging and dropping i have to do, which may sound lazy, but it annoys me every time.

I understand better now.

It would be a nice feature for a music player. I can't think of any player or tool that would do things this nicely.

I think your best bet in any media player is through a creative use of a playlist to keep your ipod albums and media player albums in sync.

Some players support 'watching' of folders. I know Itunes and WMP do this in windows. In Linux, amarok is supposed to do this, but I've never tried. Rhythmbox can also do this.

My strategy is to simply drag new album folders onto amarok, then use the manage files function to copy them into the database.

This would probably be relatively easy to write as a standalone app. I could even do it in Java so timmyjoe could use it. And so it could be uselessly slow.

You might want to give Songbird a shot. Here's a list of what seems to be available:

http://www.ubuntux.org/ipod-vs-ubuntu-t ... ronization

yeah, i think songbird will be great one day, but it's really unusably slow right now, unfortunately.

I live for slow.

Have you ever seen a 4 year olds response to "put your jammies on" or "get in here so we can brush your teeth" or "finish eating your vegetables"? It's slow.