simX's dashboard

It seems that PodWorks does not have any support for transferring track start/stop times from the iPod to iTunes. These settings are definitely respected on the iPod even when disconnected from a computer, because when tracks with start or stop times are played, the start/stop times are correctly respected on the iPod.

Is it possible that support for this setting can be added into a future release of PodWorks?

When transferring playlists to iTunes via PodWorks, PodWorks structures the playlists with songs as they appear in the PodWorks window. The problem is that if you sort the PodWorks view, PodWorks will then transfer your songs in the sorted order as they appear in the PodWorks window, regardless of whether or not the unsorted playlist actually lists the songs in that order.

For example, say you have the playlist "Alphabet" on your iPod, and you've ordered the songs in this fashion: "Z", "X", "P", "L", "R", "Y", "B", "G", "H". In the PodWorks window, if you click on the blank column header to sort by the custom playlist order, you should see the songs listed in this format. Now, if you tell PodWorks to transfer the playlist over, it'll transfer them in this order. This is the true playlist order.

Now, however, click on the "Title" column header to sort the playlist by track name. PodWorks will now show the sorted playlist in this fashion: "B", "G", "H", "L", "P", "R", "X", "Y", "Z". If you tell PodWorks to transfer the playlist over now, it'll transfer them in the *sorted* order! This is bad, because this doesn't actually reflect the true playlist order.

You're actually losing data when PodWorks transfers like this. iTunes can easily sort by track name or by any of the other criteria that PodWorks can use to sort. So there's no reason to transfer the sort order to the playlist order — the user can easily do that in two short steps in iTunes if they want to.

The problem is that PodWorks retains the selected sort column if you start viewing a different playlist in PodWorks. So you might accidentally initiate a transfer, not realizing that there's a sort order in place.

The fix would seem to be pretty evident: make PodWorks always transfer playlists in the true playlist order.

I reported a week or so ago about a lot of metadata transfer errors that I was experiencing with the latest version of PodWorks. Most of them were resolved by setting the medium time format to a more sane value (that doesn't include the date). That solved most of the errors.

There are, however, a few more transfer errors lingering, and I'd like to see if I can resolve these as well. I get two kinds. The first type of error reads: "-10006: iTunes got an error: Can’t set library playlist id 6795 of source id 40 to «class null»". The second type reads: "-2753: The variable theSong is not defined."

I can't seem to see any pattern to the first type of error, but the second type of error only seems to occur on iTunes videos, not songs. In fact, this error only occurred on 4 videos in total (TV shows, in particular), but I don't have very many videos on my iPod anyway (9 TV shows, 2 movies). The first type of error occurred on 60 of my songs. (For reference, I did a transfer of 3388 songs that are already in my library, so PodWorks is basically metadata transferring if necessary. Getting only 64 errors out of 3388 is an error rate of less than 2% which is excellent, but it'd be better if it were 0%. :) )

You can access all the related PodWorks Console error messages by going to http://homepage.mac.com/simx/podworks... . It's basically the same messages over and over again, but since it includes the song info, perhaps you can figure out if there's a pattern or not.

I'm happy to provide any more information or test out a beta version to help diagnose the problem. You're welcome to contact me (@simX) on Twitter, if you'd like.

I copied most of my music library from my iPod's library to a new computer, but I already had a few songs in my library via iTunes' built-in "Transfer Purchases" functionality for songs that were purchased from the iTunes Store.

In PodWorks 2.9.3's preferences, I've selected "Always" for the "Actively Prevent Duplicates" pop-up menu, and I've checked the "Transfer metadata only for songs already in iTunes". However, when I attempt to transfer the metadata for these files by selecting the appropriate songs on my iPod and clicking the "Selected to iTunes" toolbar button, I get an error message for each song.

Usually the error message says "-30720: Invalid date and time 2008-04-03 00:59." or something like that. I'm not sure what date and time it's referring to, though -- maybe the last played or last skipped time, because it's not the current date, and it's too recent to have been the date added. One song has the error "-10006: iTunes got an error: Can't set library playlist id 5260 of source id 39 to «class" and the rest of the message gets truncated by the Transfer Errors window.

Other relevant info: I run my system under the Italian localization (although PodWorks does not have one so it defaults to English, my next setting). I also have a non-standard medium-length time format set up in the International preference pane -- my time format includes the date via a trick (see http://www.macosxhints.com/article.ph... ), so maybe this is causing problems.

Any ideas on how to fix this problem? I want to transfer my metadata to my library before I set my iPod to sync with this new library.