Problem: my collection does not only contain mp3s, it contains oggs, and flacs, too.
and a lot of (mostly cheap, but ipod, too) mp3-portables won\'t support these formats; or the high-bitrate-mp3s will cost too much of storage on the portable.
why don\'t extend the \'ipod-section\' to a complete mountable-portable-device-section? where it\'s possible to transcode any-playable-file to a preset-format with preset-bitrate, and a status bar showing the progress of transcoding to the user?
if the user got too much HDD-space, why don\'t support caching of the transcoded files for later re-use?

just some ideas...
greetings from vienna/austria,
roland

While the MD browser has finally been seeing some development, and will likely support many more devices in 1.4 I still think re-encoding should be done externally. For one there are already many apps that do this well, and also there are at least two amaroK scripts that transcode already, not to mention the extra bloat it would add.

I'm not sure if this post will be a continuation of the original poster's thoughts, but I think the title matches my thoughts... so here goes:

I've got an iPod and it syncs beautifully with Amarok - for the most part.  I have a lot of FLAC albums that I would love to get onto my iPod as transcoded MP3s but I've never been able to get the transKode script to work.   Has anyone else successfully configured transKode to work with converting FLAC file to MP3s for an iPod?

What about built-in transcoding in Amarok?  This seems like a useful thing for Media Devices.  Have the option to always convert songs before putting them onto the device.  I could see a lot of people using that when they have a smaller device (like an iPod shuffle or something) and would like say 96kbps MP3s instead of the 192kbps files they have on their PC.  Or, like in my case, where I want my FLAC music converted to MP3s for my player

Thoughts?

Just to add that I'm surprised that trancoding from flac to mp3 to an iPod doesn't work   Support for the creative zen extra has only just been added (1.4.1), and this is exactly what I do.  In the media device setup there is the option of  "transcode before transferring", of course the transcode script also has to be configured.

George.

When transferring to ipods, it will always try to transcode to m4a - as this is the ipod's preferred format. For this to work, you have to have faac installed.

Martin Aumueller wrote:When transferring to ipods, it will always try to transcode to m4a - as this is the ipod's preferred format. For this to work, you have to have faac installed.

Thanks for the replies, Martin and gseaton.  I've found that, as you've said, Amarok tries to convert to m4a for my iPod.  Is there any way to change this default?  I'd much prefer -aps MP3s!

Regards,
-Aaron

Aaron,

Have you tried
Tools -> Script Manager ->  Transcode -> Configure -> Profiles
and selected amaroK TTMD - mp3 ? (and of course configured media device to transcode on transfer).
(I'm not sure what your -aps mp3 is  ).

This works for the zen xtra, hope it works for you.

George.

Aaron,

if -aps is Lame -alt-preset standard then my last post settings should give you that.

Good luck.......

George.

Thanks again for your replies.

I have tried "selecting" many different profiles, including the Amarok TTMD MP3 profile and the various other MP3 profiles.  The transKode scripts doesn't seem to use them though, it keeps converting to M4A.

I still can't get Amarok to transcode to MP3 for my iPod, it always attempts M4A's.  It appears that the M4A's use the ID3v1.1 tags which in my case are different than the ID3v1.2 tags.  How can I force it to convert to MP3 or get the M4A's to use ID3v.1.2 tags?