help importing music to mp3 player

[slomo]

Hi guys,

I'm having a problem that I'm sure someone has dealt with here. I have my lossless flac/shn collection archived on an external HD, and I want to do a bulk conversoin off all my music to mp3 so that I can listen to it on my ipod. I chose mp3 because i might be ditching my ipod for an android phone and that format is the most ubiquitous. The problem is that i want my tags and folder structures to remain intact. I have trird burning a show to disc and then importing it, which works great - I was actually amazed at some of the boots that itunes recognized and tagged -- but this is obviously not the way I want to convert a TB of music! Anyone have any suggestions? I usually use foobar to convert. Currently, I'm using itunes as my music database, but I am open to others ( I think i have a copy of media monkey gold somewhere) Thanks.

[tonebloke]

dBPowerAmp will do the job. Also TLH.

Have a look at Gizmo's for some more ideas on good solutions to your problem.

[Thulani]

Foobar can do it. Kind a hard for me to explain it, but I'll try my best.

- Create a folder, lets say MP3, somewhere on your hard drive which will be the output folder.
- add your folders to foobar (first just 2 or 3 to see if it's working)
- right click => convert => ... (guess you already know that)
- Output format: MP3 (guess you knew this too)
- check 'Specify folder' and give the path of your MP3 folder
- check 'Convert each track to an individual file'
- in the 'Name format' field write: $replace(%path%,'PATH_OF_YOUR_FILES',,%filename_ext%,%filename%)
- click OK

PATH_OF_YOUR_FILES = The place where you keep your folders.

[GRC]

The folder structure won't matter if you're importing mp3s to iTunes (and hence to your iPod). iTunes will categorise them based on artist/album/track number tags and won't care if you have multiple albums in one folder, or one folder for each album (or show).

TLH will convert batches of flacs to batches of mp3s, but not sure if it will keep tags across the conversion. Anyone?

[Thulani]

TLH can keep the tag info, but it's slow when it comes to adding files. Drag n drop of multiple folders is not working.

[slomo]

Thanks for all the input. I dusted off my old copy of dbpoweramp to see if the batch converter was included and it is. It seems like the easiest option. Which leads me to this question (let me know if this needs another thread) -- What is the best prog. for tagging boots? I've used foobar's live music taggers before with somewhat limited success. I also have a copies of Magic MP3 tagger and Music IP mixer which both use, if i recall, MusicBrainz tagging software. So I'm thinking convert --> tag --> import. Anyone?