iTunes is a bit chaotic
Community Forums/General Help/iTunes is a bit chaotic
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| I've invested in a bit of Apple hardware in the last year, and figured I might as well make some use of the iPod that's thrown in the back of a drawer for 99% of the time when I'm not testing games on it. So I downloaded iTunes for Windows, as I have an external hard drive connected with all my MP3s on it (about 5,000 or so). They're organised in folders as such: Artist Name ...Album Name ......MP3s here ...Another Album Name ......MP3s here Another Artist Name ...Album Name ......MP3s here I figured if I imported the whole lot into my iTunes library, it would lump all the MP3s together in albums according to the folder layout and filename, like every other MP3 player I've used, but it doesn't seem to. I have hundreds of "Unknown Artist" albums containing one or two songs. Presumably it's getting its information from the MP3 tags in the file itself, which is bad because many of them don't have this information. Are there settings somewhere that will let me change this behaviour? Because I'm buggered if I'm going to get all my CDs out and rip them all again. |
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| If you go to iTunes->Preferences->Advanced->Importing->Automatically retrieve CD names from Internet. EDIT :- On Windoze goto Edit->Preferences........... It should pull the info down for you from the Gracenote CDDB. It may give you a choice and select the appropriate info. Last edited 2011 |
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| That's already checked. Thx tho! |
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| Just a few notes You have to have an account with itunes, i.e. registered with credit card before you can use the retrieve album info. Also i don't know how you added the albums but you could try: If you go into your profile/my music/itunes/ Somewhere in there, there's a folder called something like "Automatically add to itunes" If you copy a few albums into that folder itunes should automatically move them into the library I don't have itunes installed at the moment to check the exact folder but i found dropping albums in there more reliable than using import. Last edited 2011 |
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| I believe it won't download the meta-data if it's a pirated song/cd (e.g. you downloaded the mp3's). If you're ripping an original CD it should fetch the data just fine. |
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| You have to have an account with itunes, i.e. registered Yep, got that!with credit card before you can use the retrieve album info. Also i don't know how you added the albums but you could try: I went to File>>>Add Folder to Library - reason being I want the songs to remain on my external hard drive. I don't want them to be physically moved to my internal hard drive. I believe it won't download the meta-data if it's a pirated song/cd (e.g. you downloaded the mp3's). If you're ripping an original CD it should fetch the data just fine. They're original, but they were originally ripped without any album/artist tags etc... most don't even have proper track names as filenames, just Track 01.mp3 etc.I guess its my own fault for not doing it properly in the first place. Might have another crack later and just shift a couple over at a time - at least it should be manageable that way instead of having songs chucked about all over the shop. |
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| With no ID3 tag and no decent file naming structure your best bet is to really just start again unfortunately. You can set iTunes to import in MP3 if you plan on using another player at some point too. iTunes itself will rip your CD pretty well. On my Macbook Pro iTunes takes around 1 to 2 mins per CD. |
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| Ok i know it's long winded but another option is to copy all the albums to your my music folder then open windows media player and allow it to get the song titles and then import to itunes or use http://www.mediamonkey.com/ Last edited 2011 |
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| When I first read that the files might not have id tags I thought, yep thats gonna hurt. Windows media has found track/artist info with just the album tagged, although I do have a few albums that it failed to find anything but the album title. iTunes only gets used when getting podcasts or syncing iPhone/pod but recently a few compilation albums have been entered in for as many tracks found. So I cannot listen to some albums on random or anything, just album+artist, which is basically just one track. |
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| I'm having a brainfart, but there are software programs out there that will "automatically" scan those folders and files and add the appropriate mp3 tags and optionally rename the files as well. Sorry, I can't remember the name of the best one I've found, but they do exist. (Best to copy some test files somewhere, or the whole collection, and have the software do the updates.) Tag-N-Rename is probably the best id3 tag editor file renamer to use after you have the other programs "fix" your files. Try this software first, I do believe it is one of the better ones. http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard Hope this helps. [EDIT] As a side note, the suggestions about using media player are useless because media player only stores the information it finds about the songs in it's own database. It does NOT change the files themselves and will not rename the files. [/EDIT] Last edited 2011 |
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| I really don't like iTunes. I gave it a right good go too. I just felt it didn't give you enough control over what was happening. I don't know if it was resonsible for my iPod not working on my computer anymore. It works fine on everyone else. And i'm sure as hell not going to reinstall my computer, like I did with my mothers. I love the ipod though. Smashing price per GB (I have the classic version) |
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| As a side note, the suggestions about using media player are useless because media player only stores the information it finds about the songs in it's own database. It does NOT change the files themselves and will not rename the files. My experience stem from ripping via media player and syncing via iTunes, the few and I mean few that started off as track 01 and then got re tagged later when it eventually found the album info (or when I was off line and didn't fancy typing every album out myself) don't seem to be sans tags in iTunes. That, or I had to re rip them after my media drive died. I understand the artist\album\album name track number title.mp3 method as that's now I like my stuff sorted, I just never thought I'd hear of anyone not having tags when ripped. I love the ipod though. Smashing price per GB (I have the classic version) Same here, 160GB vs 64GB for the same money iir when I bought it, would much rather have it as a drag and drop into a specific folder, but hey I can use it as a HDD too, must remember to blank it of songs at some point seeing as I use my phone predominantly for music now. |
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| I said goodbye to Apple FOREVER last week and deinstalled iTunes. The final reason: somebody used my iTunes Account to buy two albums and I've been charged for that (lucky, ONLY two). I was surprised to read that because I had a strong password there. Looks like somebody hacked it, but I don't know how they did it. But that's not the reason why I'm so upset now. The reason is that it took Apple three days (!) to answer my raised ticket to close my account for security reasons (with a standard email reply) with no regret, no "we will investigate further into that", no "we will talk to Click&Buy to get your money back - I had to do everything myself. F*** up Apple! Lost a customer. Click&Buy was two days faster than Apple, still charged my account but promised to pay it back, let's see if this happens soon... |
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| I use to use a program, which I cannot remember the name of, but a google search shows plenty of similar programs. You just set it to search your HD for mp3 files and it will put them in a database for you. Makes it easy to find duplicates and such. Also it will let you retag your mp3s using a regex type string. So you can set the string something like "mp3Directory/{$Artist}/{$Album}/{$TrackNum} - {$TRackname}.mp3" and it will parse and tag all your mp3s. Just found one called mp3tag that seems to do well. http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html |
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| if its not been said I would also set itunes to let you manage folder stucture, forget the exact option, but iTunes like to mess with your songs and puts them where it thinks their meant to go regardless of what folder their in on your harddrive, something that annoyed the hell outa me for a while . |
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| My mp3s suffer from the same problem, I ripped 1000s of them years ago back it the days of pentium before CCDB was standard. I just named the files myself: Artist-Album-001-Songname.mp3 Artist-Album-002-Songname.mp3 Artist-Album-003-Songname-mp3 etc... I still use winamp for this very reason and imo is still the simplest and best player on the planet. This is what I use on nux, android, osx and windows anyway, not tried the iOS version, but apparently there is one. Edit: Saying that, there must be some kind of filename-tag to embedded-tag converter out there :/ Last edited 2011 |
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| well, i really wanted to use this as a means to get some mp3s onto my iPod, and I gather that iTunes is the only way to do it, short of jailbreaking my iPod which I don't want to do. With all of that said, it's not really a case of just using another media player. |
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| Ah... right so. :/ what about my conversion idea? You might find one that can treat folder structures as tags. (i have seen similar things for photos before) |
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| Thanks for that - did the job really well. Got all my MP3 tags sorted in about four hours as it still required a fair bit of effort, though not nearly as much as going through them all one by one. (Yes it's taken me five months to find the time/will to do it!) |
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| GfK: Thanks for reminding me why I do not want an iPod. |
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| Well, while installing an iOS update on it a couple of days ago, I was quite surprised to see the word "Vietnam" written on the headphones cable. Being an American company, could Apple have possibly gone anywhere less appropriate to get their headphones manufactured? |
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| I use my PSP everyday to listen to mp3s, simply connect via USB, copy and paste and Bobs your Uncle. I have used iTunes for a friend and hated it, confusing and reminds me of RealPlayer for some reason. (Are those guys still in business?) |
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| Thanks for the media monkey link that doesn't look too bad... Darkheart |
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