Advice re music preparation for SD cards - Mac / itunes

[Itguy]

Hi All

With my new car being a few months away I've got some time to sort my music out onto an SD card ready for the car.

I use iTunes on our iMac with a mixture of some songs I've downloaded/paid for and some I've fed the CDs into our mac and it has ripped them.

What is the best/easiest way to get these successfully onto an SD card ready for the car? Do I need to arrange them into a folder structure etc? What about artwork?

I may be 'itguy' but this doesn't really extend to macs I'm afraid - give me a cisco anything and I'm your man, and yes, I could research and find out by spending hours on google but thought I'd ask the question for anyone out there who's done it and found a decent product etc.

Cheers

 

[yetirider]

If your on a mac drag and drop them into a folder structure artist / album
iTunes leaves some non audio files which will present as errors.
I use the program below to clean my SD card.

DS_Store, ._AppleDouble, .Folders. Keep it clean. | zeroonetwenty

 

[BigD289]

If they are suitably organised just copy them across.

I use CleanMedia to remove the hidden files https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/cleanmedia/id536351518?mt=12 and Doug's scripts to sort the artwork out Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes ♫ - dougscripts.com

My library is bigger than my SD card so I also use Chronosync to select/deselect which music I want copied. Once set up it means any new music I add will get copied across.

 

[yetirider]

That's a good find, which script do you use for artwork? I have a few missing
Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes ♫ Save Album Art as folder.jpg v2.5

 

[BigD289]

I use Save Album Art, I just drop a 400 px .jpg into the album folder. Think they have to be perfectly 400 x 400 for the artwork to show.

 

[cemerson]

800x800 for tech pack, 500x500 otherwise is the max artwork size.

 

[sftdi]

I use mp3tag to change embedded album artwork for music downloaded from Amazon and emusic as they are all 600 x 600 or greater in size which is no good for the non tech pack.

 

[BigD289]

800x800 for tech pack, 500x500 otherwise is the max artwork size.

Sorry, you are right, 500 x 500 for the non tech pack!

 

[dzankizakon]

I may be 'itguy' but this doesn't really extend to macs I'm afraid - give me a cisco anything and I'm your man, and yes, I could research and find out by spending hours on google but thought I'd ask the question for anyone out there who's done it and found a decent product etc.

Consider spending a bit of time writing a php script (OS X has php built in) that syncs/copies your iTunes library to a SD card. It's boring, but once it's done it's much easier because you don't have to spend ages manually copying files every time you add one or two songs to your iTunes, you just run the script. It's worth the time.