In this method, simply select any files, folders, or shortcuts and drag them to the Dudebox Explorer window. You can drag items from a second open Explorer window or from the Desktop.

Valid drop targets in Dudebox Explorer are Audio Tracks and Data Files folders.

By "valid drop target" we mean that you can either drop onto the icon representing the folder, or anywhere in the blank area when the folder is opened in the right pane of the Dudebox Explorer window.

For those who would like to transfer from computer to Jukebox using just one window, you can open your right pane to a folder on your computer, select some items, and drag them to a valid Jukebox drop target folder in the left pane folder tree.

Send To is a Windows built-in facility that allows you to right-click on a file, folder, or shortcut and use the context menu to "send" the item to a particular destination. The Dudebox installer registers your Jukebox device(s) as destinations in your Windows Send To menu.

To use this method, select some files, folders, or shortcuts, right-click, and open the Send To menu. Then select the Jukebox destination to which you want the files transferred.

Please note that the way Windows' Send To mechanism is designed, it cannot accomodate large numbers of selected files at once. If you want to transfer more than a half dozen files at once, use one of the other methods instead. Send To can only be used for a few files at a time.

In this method, select some files, folders, or shortcuts on your computer and then use either the Windows Explorer menu, the right-click context menu, or a keyboard shortcut to "copy" the items to the Windows Clipboard. The keyboard shortcuts for copying are Control-Insert and Control-C.

Then go into a valid drop target folder in Dudebox and use either the Dudebox Explorer menu, the right-click context menu, or a keyboard shortcut to "paste" the items. The keyboard shortcuts for pasting are Shift-Insert and Control-V.

When you select a folder for transfer using one of the methods in Section 4.1, Dudebox will recursively search that folder and all of its subfolders for files to add to the transfer set. If you have all of your music arranged in folders by albums or artists under C:\Music, for example, you can transfer all of your files by just dragging and dropping the C:\Music folder to Dudebox.

You can disable sub-folder searching so that Dudebox only transfers the files you directly select. Go to the "General" tab in the Configuration dialog and check the "Turn off recursive sub-folder searching" option.

By default, Dudebox Explorer transfers MP3, WMA, and WAV files as audio tracks. All other file types are considered data.

Dudebox supports options to exclude particular file types during transfer. For example, say you have all your music files stored in C:\Music but these folders also contain JPEG files for album cover art. When you copy C:\Music to your Jukebox, you want the music files to be transferred but not the cover art files, since there's no way to view them on the Jukebox. You can instruct Dudebox to ignore data files you've selected them and only transfer the music files.

Go to the "General" tab in the Configuration dialog and check the "Always skip..." options to exclude particular file types.

Dudebox Explorer supports many playlist formats: M3U, PLS, B4S, BPL, WMP, RMP.

When Dudebox encounters a supported playlist file amongst the files you've selected for transfer, it will process it as follows. The playlist is scanned for valid references to audio files on your computer. References to files that do not exist on your computer are ignored. Files that can be found are added to the list of files to be transferred to your Jukebox. Files that already exist on the Jukebox are skipped. Only files that are not already on-board the device are actually transferred. For further discussion of how duplicates are determined, see section 4.2.5.

Dudebox will also reconstruct your playlist on-board the Jukebox.

Dudebox also supports Windows shortcuts. If a shortcut is found directly in the transfer selection or as a result of the sub-folder search, Dudebox follows that shortcut whether it points to a file or another folder.

Shortcut loop-detection prevents Dudebox from bouncing infinitely between folders that directly or indirectly refer to one another.

This feature can be helpful if you have, say, your music files stored in several different folder structures. You can create one folder containing shortcuts to all of your other music folders. Then all your music can be easily transferred by selecting just the folder with the shortcuts.

When Dudebox encounters a file that already exists on the Jukebox, the file is skipped and not re-transferred.

The way in which duplicates are determined depends on the Jukebox device model, and is actually handled by the device itself, not Dudebox Explorer. Dudebox cannot override the duplicate handling scheme of the Jukebox.

Dudebox Explorer keeps of log of the decisions it makes when building the set of files to transfer. This includes information about how sub-folders were searched, how playlist files were processed, and how shortcuts were followed. If you are wondering about why some files were included but others were not, you can likely find the answer in the filelist build log. This log is useful for diagnosing problems as well.

After a transfer is complete, click on the "View Logs" button in the Transfer dialog. Then click the "Filelist Build Log" button. Or at any time, click on the "Reports" button in the Dudebox toolbar, select the "Transfer Logs" tab, and click on the "Filelist Build Log" button to see the log for the last transfer.

At the top of the dialog are two progress bars that indicate transfer progress on the current file and overall progress across all files, respectively.

Below that, the "Cancel" button allows a transfer to be interrupted. Normally, the file being transferred when the button is clicked will complete, and then the process will abort. Any files already transferred to the Jukebox will remain there. They are not deleted after a cancellation.

When the transfer is over, either by cancellation or completion, the "Close" button becomes active. You can use either this button or the "X" button in the title bar of the dialog to close the window. If you want the transfer dialog to close automatically when the transfer is complete, check the "Auto-close dialog after transfer completes" option on the "General" tab in the Configuration dialog.

If there is a transfer in progress and you wish to add more files to the transfer queue, simply drag and drop them to the transfer dialog itself (not the target folder). Also, it is important to note that you should not initiate other operations like Jukebox playback or tag editing while a transfer is in progress.

The middle part of the dialog provides summary statistics that are updated in real-time. Once the transfer is complete, the "View Logs" button becomes active, allowing you to view the various logs Dudebox has generated as a result of the transfer process.

The transfer throughput meter shows you how fast data is being transferred to your Jukebox device. Note that the units are in megabits not megabytes. There are 8 bits to a byte. There are also estimates of time elapsed since the transfer began and time remaining until completion. These two values are currently only valid when transferring to the Jukebox, and not when transferring back to the computer.

The two other buttons in this section are related to Dudebox Arena, which is explained in more detail in a section below. The "Compare to Other Users" button brings you to the Dudebox Arena statistics page, while the "Post Your Results" button lets you post your achieved transfer throughput along with some information about your hardware setup to the Dudebox Arena database. These buttons become active after the transfer is complete.

Anyone who has worked with digital audio files knows that metadata tag information can be a powerful tool for keeping a music collection well-organized. Such tag information is embedded inside music files along with the audio data and typically includes information fields such as:

• Artist
• Album
• Track Number
• Track Title
• Genre
• Year
• Comment

These tags are commonly referred to as ID3 tags. ID3 is the tag standard used with MP3 files. Microsoft has defined its own tag format for Windows Media Audio (WMA) files that is roughly equivalent to ID3. The WAV format was created well before digital music became popular, so WAV files do not support tag information.

Tag information is typically embedded into an audio file at the time of its creation. That is, when it is first ripped and encoded from the CD source. Ripping and encoding software often connects to online tag information databases such as CDDB or FreeDB to automatically fill tags in newly created tracks. Note that this only works when first encoding because CDs have special unique ID numbers. After an audio file has been created, this automatic database lookup is no longer possible because every encoder is slightly different and people choose different encoding options and bitrates. So although two MP3 files might sound identical to a human ear, if the underlying data bits are not exactly identical, a computer cannot tell they are of the same song.

For this reason, we recommend that people ripping and encoding their own audio files from CD make sure that they enable CDDB-like features to automatically fill tags. Many files you download from the Internet will have missing or even wrong tag data. For these files you will have to use tag editing software to fix the information.

The various Jukebox device models each handle tags differently, and it is extremely important to thoroughly understand how your Jukebox deals with tag information.

Tag information is essential to the operation of the various Jukebox Jukebox models. To take full advantage of your Jukebox, you must understand how tag information is used.

The most common misunderstanding about the Jukebox is how audio files are stored and organized on board. Many people assume that the Jukebox works like a normal hard disk where you can create arbitrary folders and store your audio files in whatever folder you like. This is incorrect. Dell did not design their Jukeboxes this way.

Virtual Folders and "A Database of Music"

The best way to think of your Jukebox is as a database of music. When you transfer audio files to the Jukebox, they are all stored in a single, flat folder. The filenames they had when on your computer are discarded, and they are stored using internal id numbers. You access your audio files on-board the Jukebox and through Dudebox using virtual folders, or views, that the Jukebox constructs using tag information. The Audio Tracks, Artists, Albums, and Genres folders are therefore all dynamically constructed from the tag data associated with your audio files.

Given this design, it is not possible to "create" new folders per se. For example, people often ask how to create a new album. Well, you cannot create a new album and move files into it. Instead, what you would do is select some of your existing files and change the album field in their tags. This would have the effect of "creating" a new album.

The Tag Database

Another Jukebox design characteristic important to note is that it does not read tag information directly from within the audio files stored on your Jukebox. Tag information is often stored at the end of multi-megabyte music files, making reading tags a slow process. When dealing with several thousand audio files on a Jukebox, reading through every file to build the tag database is simply not practical. Instead, the Jukebox maintains a separate database of tag information alongside the audio file storage. Each entry in the database is a complete set of tag data and is associated with one of the files stored on the Jukebox. The Jukebox uses this database so it doesn't have to continually read through all of the audio files.

This database is only updated when you transfer a new file to the Jukebox, explicitly edit a tag on-board the Jukebox, or delete a file. During a transfer, the transfer software (PlayCenter or Dudebox) is responsible for reading the tag information out of the source audio file on the computer, and handing that data to the Jukebox along with the file. The Jukebox then puts that tag information into its database and associates that entry with the newly transferred file.

This scheme has several advantages. First, as mentioned above, it saves the Jukebox from having to repeatedly parse through all the thousands of files on-board to gather all the tag information. Second, it shifts the burden of parsing all the different tag formats from the Jukebox to the software running on the computer. This is important because software running on the computer has signficantly more processing power and resources than what is available on the Jukebox to read new and more complicated tag formats of the future. This way, the Jukebox firmware need not be updated when new tag formats arise.

Given this tag database design, Dudebox is responsible for reading tag information and passing it to the Jukebox. The next section discusses Dudebox's specific tag reading capabilities.

Organizing Tags on Your Computer

This overall design is surprising to some people at first. The most significant implication is that you should have the tags in all your audio files properly filled out before transferring them to your Jukebox, otherwise they will look a mess once on there. Although this requires some investment of time up-front, most people find that in the long run it makes managing a large collection of music much, much easier.

When transferring a file to a Jukebox, Dudebox must read the tag information from the source audio file on the computer and pass it along with the file data to the Jukebox. This section describes how Dudebox does that.

This section does not apply to Jukebox II-series and MuVo. It only applies to Jukebox models.

ID3 Tags

ID3 is the tag format for MP3 files. Dudebox is capable of reading both ID3 V1 and ID3 V2 tag formats. For each file, Dudebox will first attempt to read the V2 tag. If it does not exist, Dudebox will read the V1 tag.

WMA Tags

WMA files have their own tag format, which Dudebox can read. If you are using WMA files, you must have Windows Media Player 7.0 or higher installed on your comptuer for Dudebox to be able to read WMA tags.

Filename Parsing

If the tag information cannot be read from the audio file, Dudebox attempts to guess the tag information by parsing the name and path of the file.

Filling-In Missing Tag Information

To successfully transfer a file to the Jukebox, Dudebox must provide at least the Artist, Album and Title, because these are the fields the Jukebox uses to uniquely identify an audio track. If Dudebox cannot either read all three of them from the tag or guess them from the filename, they must be filled in manually by you or filled in with boilerplate information.

Normally, if Dudebox cannot fill the three fields for a file during transfer, it will pop-up a dialog box asking for you to manually fill in the information. Dudebox Explorer has several options to alter this default behavior. They can be found on the "Jukebox" tab in the Configuration dialog.

First, Dudebox can be configured to skip files whose tag information cannot be automatically determined. Check the "Auto-skip files with incomplete ID3 tags" option to enable this. You can examine the transfer log afterwards to find which files did not transfer due to incomplete tags and fix them later. Second, Dudebox can fill the missing fields with boilerplate text. Check the "Auto-complete ID3 tags with missing fields" option to enable this and provide the text you want Dudebox to fill with in the box below it.

Dudebox Explorer can import playlists from your computer to your Jukebox. Simply drag and drop (or use any of the other transfer methods) a playlist file to the Jukebox. Dudebox Explorer supports several playlist formats: M3U, PLS, B4S, BPL.

When Dudebox encounters a supported playlist file amongst the files you've selected for transfer, it will process it as follows. The playlist is scanned for valid references to audio files on your computer. References to files that do not exist on your computer are ignored. Files that can be found are added to the list of files transfer to the Jukebox. Files that already exist on the Jukebox are skipped. Only files that are not already on-board the device are actually transferred. For further discussion of how duplicates are determined, see section 4.2.5.

Dudebox will also reconstruct your playlist on-board the Jukebox.

Dudebox can automatically generate playlists on-board the Jukebox even when you are not transferring playlist files. At the end of each transfer, Dudebox asks if you wish to create playlists that match the sub-folders that Dudebox found during the transfer set construction process. If you answer yes, these playlists will be created. This can be useful when you have created folder structures on your computer's music collection that you want reflected as playlists on your Jukebox.

By default, Dudebox will not create or change a playlist if one with the same name already exists on the Jukebox. If you want Dudebox to overwrite existing playlists during import, enable the "When importing, overwrite existing playlists with the same name" option on the Jukebox tab of the Config dialog.

While the tag reading mechanisms described above should suffice in most situations, sometimes you need a bit more control. Dudebox includes a feature called Advanced Transfer Management (ATM) that gives you just such control over the tag and transfer process. This feature is only applicable to Jukebox models because Jukebox II-series and MuVo devices do not use a tag database.

To enable ATM, go the "Jukebox" tab in the Configuration dialog and check the "Enable Advanced Transfer Management" option. Once this option is checked, the next time you open the Configuration dialog there will be an additional tab named "Advanced Transfer" with additional options to control ATM.

When ATM is enabled, you will see a new ATM dialog appear after initiating the transfer but before the file transfer actually begins. You use the ATM dialog to specify every aspect of the transfer before it begins so once it does, it can proceed without further intervention from you. The features of ATM are divided into three tabs which are described in the following sections.

After you have finished going through the tabs and are satisfied with the transfer settings, click the "OK" button at the bottom of the window to proceed with the transfer. To cancel the transfer, click "Cancel".

This tab allows you to review and edit all the tag information Dudebox has collected and plans to send to the Jukebox along with your audio files.

The main list box displays all the files that are part of the transfer. Each of the tag fields is displayed in a separate column. Items marked with a red 'X' are ones for which Dudebox could not fill the minimum required fields of Artist, Album, and Title. You need to fill in those fields for those items or they will be skipped during the transfer. Items marked with a green check have all the necessary information for a successful transfer. While you don't need to edit items with green check, you can still change the values for the non-essential fields to your liking. Before you begin the transfer, scroll through the list and make sure all the files you intend to transfer have green checkmarks.

When a file is selected in the list box, the full path of the source file on the computer is displayed in the smaller box above.

To edit the tag information for a particular file, right-click to bring up the context menu. To edit the tag information for more than one file at a time, select multiple files (using the "Shift" or "Control" keys), and right-click to bring up the context menu. The menu has these options:

• Edit Tag(s): Brings up a dialog for editing each tag field.
  
  
• Copy Field to Field: Copies the contents of one field to another.
• Swap Two Tag Fields: Swaps the contents of two fields.
• Auto-Fill Track Numbers: Assigns sequential track numbers to a group of files using the starting value and increment you specify.
  
  
• Prepend Artist to Title: Copies the artist name and prepends it to the track title. This is useful for compilation albums where each track is by a different artist.
• Prepend Track Number to Title: Copies the track number and prepends it to the track title. This is useful for classical albums where track titles are long and similar and only differ at the end. The differences may be so far to the right that the Jukebox mistakes them for duplicate tracks. Prepending the track number to the title allows the Jukebox to differentiate between such tracks.
  
  
• Re-read Fields from Tag: Discards any changes you have made and causes Dudebox to reread tag information from the source file.
• Reparse Fields from Filename: Discards any changes you have made and causes Dudebox to reparse tag information from the filename (ignoring the tag).
  
  
• Remove from Transfer List: Removes selected file(s) from the transfer list. Files you remove will not be transferred. You can also remove a file by selecting it and pressing the "Delete" key on your keyboard.

You can also reorder files in the list by dragging and dropping. This might not seem useful at first (since order of transfer is irrelevant for the Jukebox), but combined with the "Auto-Fill Track Numbers" feature this can be helpful. For example, if you have an album's worth of files which for one reason or another does not have track numbers assigned, you can drag and drop them into the right order, then auto-fill the track numbers in sequence.

Note that when you change the tag information here you are not editing the tag embedded in the source audio file on your computer. The tag data you are editing is an independent set that is to be transferred to the Jukebox. If you cancel the transfer at this point, the tag information you have edited simply vanishes. If you do want your edits written back to the source audio files on your computer, Dudebox has a feature called Tag WriteBack, which is described in its own section below.

The Data Files tab displays all the non-audio files that Dudebox found during the transfer set construction process. To skip a specific file or set of files, select them in the list box and hit the "Delete" key on your keyboard. To skip and not transfer any of the data files for this transfer, simply check the box labeled "Check here to SKIP all data files". This is not a permanent option, and only applies to the current transfer.

This tab displays all the playlists that Dudebox plans to create on the Jukebox after transfer. These may be playlists created to reflect playlist files that are part of the transfer, or automatically created playlists to reflect sub-folders. Simply uncheck the proposed playlists that you do not wish to be created. Or use the "Select All" or "Deselect All" buttons to quickly choose all or none of the playlists.

By default, Dudebox will not create or change a playlist if one with the same name already exists on the Jukebox. If you want Dudebox to overwrite existing playlists during import, enable the "When importing, overwrite existing playlists with the same name" option on the Jukebox tab of the Config dialog.

ATM has several associated options. Changes to the options in this tab are permanent, and apply to the current as well as future transfers.

Automatic Tag Generation

These are the options that govern how Dudebox parses tag information from the filename when embedded tag information is not available.

The first option is the list of characters Dudebox will use to break the filename into individual tag fields. The default list contains just a hypen "-". You can specify your own list, using spaces to separate each character in your list. Here is an example using the default list:

C:\Music\Britney Spears - Oops - 02 - Stronger.mp3

The filename is broken into the following pieces: "Britney Spears", "Oops", "02", and "Stronger". Dudebox starts from the right side. The first item is taken to be the track Title, which here is "Stronger". Next, Dudebox looks for a numeric field. If one is found, such as "02" in this case, it is used as the Track Number. If not, the Track Number is set to zero. Next, Dudebox looks for the Album, and finally, the Artist. Often, a filename may not include the Album name and Track Number:

C:\Music\Britney Spears - Stronger.mp3

In this case, there is no numeric field so the Track Number is skipped. And because there aren't enough fields to support both an Artist and Album, the left-most field is assumed to be the Artist.

Some people prefer to have Artist and Album information encoded as folders, so that the file names only contain track information:

C:\Music\Britney Spears\Oops\01 - Stronger.mp3

In this case, you want to check the "Use folder names when filename has too few fields to fill tag" option. When this option is enabled, the folder names of "Britney Spears" and "Oops" will be used for the Artist and Album, respectively.

Finally, when there are not enough fields to support an Album, you can customize the text with which Dudebox fills the Album field. The default text is "Single".

Tag WriteBack

Normally, the tag edits you make in ATM are used only for transfer to the Jukebox and do not affect the original source files on the computer. If you want these edits to be written back to the original source files, enable Tag WriteBack.

When Tag WriteBack is enabled, there are two additional options. You can choose to have Dudebox write back either ID3V1 tags, ID3V2 tags, or both. Note that writing back ID3V2 tags can be slow, especially on large files, since write V2 tags can potentially involve rewriting the entire file on disk. These options do not apply to WMA tags.

Dudebox Explorer's One-Touch Synchro feature is a one-way, non-destructive synchronization transfer. The basic concept is to select a folder on your computer that contains your music collection. What Synchro does is keep your Jukebox up to date with the contents of that folder. So, whenever you download new music to that folder or rip new songs from CD, just run a Synchro and bring your Jukebox up to speed.

One-Touch Synchro does not transfer files back to the computer or otherwise propagate changes made on the Jukebox back to the computer. For safety, it also never deletes files. Future releases of Dudebox Explorer will introduce more sophisticated two-way syncing and mirroring capabilities.

To configure One-Touch Synchro, go to the "Jukebox" tab in the Configuration dialog. Type in or use the "Browse" button to select a folder location on your computer for synchronization with your Jukebox. To initiate "Synchro" operation, just click the Synchro button in the Dudebox toolbar.

You can also have Dudebox synchronize from multiple folders on your PC. To do this, create a new folder on your PC and configure Dudebox to use it for One-Touch Synchro. Inside this new folder, create Windows shortcuts to each of the real folders you want to be part of the synchronization. Dudebox Explorer knows how to read these shortcuts and will follow them to each of your specified folders. Voila! Multi-folder synchro.