MusicIP Mixer Help - Using MP3 Players and Other Devices

As of version 1.1.4, MusicIP Mixer has support for devices which can be mounted as removable drives. Note that this is a premium feature which will required an active key (either paid or trial).

Getting started with your device

When you have a device connected, it should show up automatically under the Filters & Playlists window with the device name and drive letter. If you add and remove devices, this window should be updated automatically. If for some reason it does not, you can try using the File/Devices/Scan For New Devices menu option.

The first time you select your device, you will be asked whether you want to refresh the view. This will load a snapshot of all the songs and playlists stored on the device into MusicIP Mixer. Once this is complete, you will be able to browse the collection of music on your device.

The information about your device is normally stored in the devices subfolder where your other MusicIP Mixer files are located (on Windows, this is the installation directory). This allows MusicIP Mixer to have your music collection instantly available next time you start MusicIP Mixer. Before you do your first refresh, you have to option Store cache on the device. If you select this option, the cache file will be stored in the root folder of your device as autoload.m3lib. Whenever MusicIP Mixer finds an autoload cache, it will load it automatically. This cache file is portable between Mac, Windows and Linux, so you can move your device freely between machines and share the cache.

Moving your music

Once your device is ready, you can copy songs to or from your device easily using drag and drop. To copy songs to your device, drag them from your library or file explorer and drop them onto the node representing your device. To copy songs from your device to your computer, drag them from your device library to the node representing your Library. Note that DRM'd files will be copied, but licenses will not be transferred.

The files will be stored according to the publish pattern of your library, or associated device. To configure this, right-click on the library or device, and choose Properties. The Song publish pattern is a template which describes where files will be stored. For example:

Music\%artist\%album\%0t - %name.%ext

will store your songs into the Music folder, with subfolders for artist and album name. The actual song filename will be the track number followed by a dash, the song name, and finally the file extension. For a detailed overview of the pattern options, see the patterns overview.

You can also copy your songs using the Copy/Move/Rename Files... menu, available by right-clicking on the songs you want to copy.

Creating playlists

When you create a new playlist on a device, you will asked to name the playlist. The playlist will be stored as an M3U file on your device, using the Playlist publish pattern, which can be configured by right-clicking on the device and selecting Properties. (See the previous section about song publish patterns for more details).

You may need to set some options on how the playlist is stored to support your device. By right-clicking on the playlist, you can set either long or short filenames (on Windows), EXTM3U format or plain lists,, and short or relative paths. You may need to experiment to see what works best on your device.

Using network drives

You can take advantage of the disk-based device support to manage multiple caches from a single MusicIP Mixer. Just use the File/Devices/Add New Device... menu and select the root which contains music which you want to treat as a device. This might be useful for sharing caches on a networked drive which is mounted in different locations on different machines.

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Device specific notes

Apple's iPod

The iPod stores extra information about your songs in a proprietary database which MusicIP Mixer does not currently support directly on the device. For this reason, publishing to iPods is currently disabled. MusicIP mixes and playlists can be published to the iPod via iTunes. On Mac, there is an AppleScript which can create MusicIP mixes within iTunes.

You can use MusicIP Mixer to copy music directly off your iPod into your library.