iTunes backup of PocketPedia hours long

[jschaffe]

Hi,

I just downloaded and installed CDPedia (on My PowerMac G5) and PocketPedia (on my 32 GB 1st gen iPod Touch). I imported an approx. 23,000 track iTunes library into CDPedia and then synced it with PocketPedia. After discovering that many albums were missing covers, I located the ability to turn large artwork off and synced again. It seemed to work, but when I connected the iPod to my Mac, it started a backup that's 2/3 done after 2 hours.

I'm using the latest firmware and iTunes. I found a thread here from last fall that seemed to show that this problem was an issue last summer (2008), but was apparently fixed in the September, 2008 firmware update.

Unfortunately, I'm still experiencing it. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[Conor]

Since you have already done a large covers sync the covers will still be present on the iPod Touch and need to be backed up by iTunes. Delete Pocketpedia from the iPod Touch and re-download to get a new empty data set. Then set the small covers option before running the first sync, the backup now should be a lot shorter. If you would like to keep the full screen size covers then let the current backup finish and the next one should take the normal amount of time. The new iTunes is smart about the files that have changed since the last backup.

[jschaffe]

Thanks, Conor, I'll see how the 2nd backup goes, but one other issue is that PP never downloaded covers for all the albums when it was set to "large"; that's what caused me to turn "large" off. Now I have covers for everything. (Well almost; there's an album I bought from the iTunes store via my iPod that's missing, but I've noticed that it sometimes is missing in the iPod's music player as well...although sometimes it's there!)

[Conor]

Thank you for the update. Could be the synced was canceled with the large covers and you never got the full cover information. I will test large databases again and see if I can improve the program. Thank you for the details. For the one missing cover you can drag a substitute image in from a web browser to update it in CDpedia.

[jschaffe]

Thanks for the artwork suggestion!

[sjk]

If possible (maybe with iPhone 3.0?), I'd like an option to completely disable Pocketpedia backups during iTunes synching. Even if a future version of Pocketpedia has bi-directional synching with desktop 'pedia apps the latter will always have a master database that can be fully restored to mobile device(s). Worst case would be losing changes on the mobile side before they were copied to the master, but that's a risk I'd be willing to take.

[Conor]

We will put in that request in with Apple, see if it's a possibility for the future.

[sjk]

Thanks, Conor. After some extensive DVDpedia updates a couple days ago the Pocketpedia synching to my iPod touch, while slow, was still significantly faster than the subsequent iTunes synching backup. That ain't right.