The iTunes thread: iTunes version <insert number> is out: Tell us how much you hate it

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The iTunes thread: iTunes version <insert number> is out: Tell us how much you hate it

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

Super Dude posted:

I just installed iTunes and added my music library, but I'm having a weird issue. Why have I suddenly lost 2.5 GB of music?

I have the same problem. Some mp3's itunes simply refuses to load. I had to resort to downloading some music i had ripped from cd but which wouldn't load at all. I guess it has something to do with the way the music is ripped from cd?

# ¿ Dec 13, 2008 10:34

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 21:52

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

Pantsmaster Bill posted:

Why will itunes not let me retag some albums? I've got a couple of albums that I can't change the tags on at all, and some with just a few songs that won't work.
I'll go to tag it, and it'll appear to be changed, but as soon as I play the song, it reverts back to the old tags. I've tried the "convert id3 tags" option, and I have ownership of the files, so I have no idea why I can't edit them. Any ideas?

Most likely faulty mp3's. Use MP3 validator to scan all your files and fix them. It worked for all my mp3's with that same problem.

http://www.gromkov.com/faq/repair/mp3_validator.html

# ¿ Dec 23, 2008 09:43

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

Fangs404 posted:

I manually manage all my music (I have it all laid out essentially like genre/artist/album/tracknumber - title) and my tags. The simple fact that iTunes doesn't have a "refresh library" command or something boggles my mind. When I add or delete a folder into/from my music directory, iTunes should automatically detect this and adjust its library accordingly.

I'm coming from foobar2000, though, a much more audiophilic (I think I made that up) program that supports these things. I just got a 6.5G 120GB iPod Classic literally earlier this week, and after much playing around, I've decided to stick to using foo_dop for syncing. That way, I don't have to deal with iTunes' misreading of the ID3 tags, and I don't have to manually manage my library (manually managing my filesystem is all I should have to do). I've been very pleased with foo_dop. It's clear that it's a solid plugin (it's been consistently developed for since December 2007), and anyone in the same situation as me should definitely look into it. The only thing I need iTunes around for now is to update my iPod's firmware.

I felt the same, but since, thanks to this thread, i learned about the smart playlists i simply cannot go back to foobar anymore. It's worth having to manually remove things from my library.

Although i agree with you that it's just stupid that itunes misses that. Maybe it does auto-update the library if you let itunes manage it?

# ¿ Jan 16, 2009 20:20

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

rckstar79 posted:

I think I saw it briefly mentioned at some point, but is anyone using Tune Up? My music collection is a mess, and I thought this might be a good way to remedy the issue, but I would like to hear some opinions.

I got it and i'm really pleased with it. It's not perfect, but having used it to clean up my whole collection (400 albums) it found more than 95% of it, including the right albumart. It's not useful for cleaning up compilation-albums, but that's about it. And it sometimes assigns strange genre's to albums, but i guess that's not really the programs fault, as it's more a matter of personal preference.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2009 18:20

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

Grayham posted:

I use GimmeSomeTune.

There's no real easy way to batch add lyrics but it adds lyrics to songs as they're played.

FYI, iTunes will pause for a second or two as the lyrics are added to the song. I believe it's an iTunes limitation.

Pc users can use Soundcrank, its free and also adds artwork.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2009 15:25

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

CaptainCrunch posted:

Allright, got another question here, or a few.

Got my library arranged pretty much how I want it to be, thanks to the earlier advice. (Except for iTunes randomly losing artwork...sigh)

Now, I'm syncing the music to a 16gb iPhone. I do the lion's share of my listening on that at work, thusly that's where I'm rating my music and trusting the syncs to move the rating data back to the main library. So far so good.

I've been making smart playlists up the wazoo thanks to this thread and I've run into a snag. If I check the playlists to synch with the iphone, iTunes wants to move all the muisc on the lists to the phone. Where this becomes a problem is when the total amount of music exceeds the phone's capacity iTunes just says "naw, can't do it" and stops the sync without doing anything.

I'm trying to figure out how to get the functionality of the smart playlists onto the phone without running into this. Without each list also insisting on bringing the tracks it identifies from my library as well.

IE I want my "must sync" songs and a healthy gob of random tracks from my library and then have my 5 star, 1 week, "these aren't rated, rate them" lists to be available on the phone to play the tracks on the phone.

Does that make sense?

Make a smart playlist which consists of the playlists you want on it plus a playlist which consists of random tracks (limited to a certain size), limit the size of that all-encompassing playlist to the capacity of your ipod? It's a bit of a hassle, but it works for me to always have around 90% of my ipod's capacity.

9-Volt Assault fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Feb 5, 2009

# ¿ Feb 5, 2009 18:09

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

IUG posted:

Made myself a new playlist. "Catchup '09".

This shows me everything I haven't listened to yet in this year. I have 1,556 songs in this playlist right now after creating it. It's 4 days, 13 hours, and 22 minutes long, with some songs not listened to as far back as August. I have 3,995 songs that aren't comedy or video files in my library, so there is some serious neglect going on here.

O wow, i just followed this idea and i got a playlist which contained about 90% of my total number of tracks. :aaa:

# ¿ Feb 20, 2009 16:18

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

Aw man, i accidently deleted my entire library and itunes loses all data regarding last time you played a song and rating once you remove it from your library. Now i have to start all over rating my songs and i also lost about 5 months worth of data to be used with smart playlists.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2009 17:14

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

You really have to think about what kind of playlists you want. "intelligent playlists" is not really helpful for us. Read through the whole thread, some playlist-ideas have been posted.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2009 11:06

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

trilljester posted:

Is there a way to visit the iTunes Store of another country? Or set your iTunes to act like you're in a different country?

I'm not allowed to buy from another Itunes Store, only that of my own country. So i would check with Apple before buying a gift card.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2009 22:04

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

If you have a smart playlist with live updating on it should update all at once. When you sync it updates the last played date, this in turn removes those songs from the playlist and because the playlist is told to always contain 800 songs it updates itself with more songs.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2009 12:58

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

Itunes 8.1 has been released, which seems to have a, for me, significant speedboost when switching between playlists and the library or scrolling the library.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2009 12:13

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

outlier posted:

An odd question: how does ITunes deal with recursively defined Smart Playlists? Since one of the criteria for playlists is "in / not in <other playlist>", it would seem to be easy to create smart playlist combinations that are unresolvable or troublesome. Anyone ever tried this?

is the result.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2009 15:01

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

Ur Getting Fatter posted:

Does anyone know if there's any reliable way of fixing dead music links besides re-adding everything? I tried modifying the .xml file but that only works for stuff that was downloaded/sorted through iTunes, and not for most of everything else.

http://paulmayne.org/blog/2007/11/how-to-remove-broken-or-dead-tracks-from-itunes/

this works for me.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2009 07:27

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

fyallm posted:

So there is no easy way to just delete the duplicate file? Does anyone know if this is possible? because I have about 10k songs that have either 1 or more duplicates and 1 by 1 would take forever

How in gods name did you get so many duplicates? :psyduck:

but no, i dont think its possible without the help of something like Dupe Eliminator, which is too expensive in my opinion.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2009 16:48

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

Well, guess you can do it the hard way: clean up your music directory and remove all dead links in itunes afterwards. At least i think there is no reason for you to keep all the duplicates on your hard drive?

# ¿ Apr 16, 2009 18:19

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

http://www.pulptunes.com/

this is quite awesome. You can listen to your itunes library through a webpage.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2009 22:00

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

BusinessWallet posted:

I have about 11,000 sounds and I'd say about 5,000 of them now have messed up tags as a result of using SongGenie. Is there any software you'd recommend to repair all of them, preferably a software that would pull from a database?

Tuneup Companion.

http://www.tuneupmedia.com/

It's not free, but it's worth it. It hasnt failed me once so far, except with some really obscure compilations.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2009 18:31

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

thelightguy posted:

Genius mixes... Arrrrgh!

Most of the ones it came up with aren't that bad, beyond reminding me that I really need to fix genre tags, but there are a few that are just bizarre. Like one that plays grunge, 90's rock, and an ambient album from 2005. Is there no way to influence the mixes?

Also, the names it comes up with are godawful and you can't change them, although that might just be my poor genre tags.

I think he creates different ones when you reload all genius data.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2009 09:22

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

Todd Flanders posted:

I installed iTunes and opened it and it scoured my computer to find movies and songs to add. It added a bunch of crap that I don't really want in iTunes to begin with.

Is there an easy way to 'start over' and just erase everything (from iTunes, not deleting the actual files), so that I can add things manually?

Select all files in your library and delete them? This doesnt delete them from your harddrive.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2009 16:52

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

revolther posted:

I was trying to just hit the genius button in the now playing area, I guess you have to right click and start genius on a song to update the playlist instead of mixes now. Because simple intuitive design says, "Genius button on currently playing song? Why that should scan your whole library and return 12 mixes completely unrelated to this song."

Guess Genius playlists are viewable in list format, Genius mixes are just mysteries wrapped in enigmas.

Is there a way to automatically scan a folder for new songs? I keep all my music on an external, and as I download new music, I tag/name it then drop it in a Music folder under Artist/Album. It's quite irritating to either re-add the whole 80gig folder and remove duplicates, or to meticulously go through each new artist and album to import them.

Letting iTunes "manage" or rename/convert/fuckup my music collection isn't a viable option.

No, you cant. Just let itunes manage that poo poo, it does the same as you do, only automatically. Hell, if you change the artist/album it even makes new directories, removes the old one and moves the files to it. It doesnt matter its on an external, i have it there too and it works perfectly.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2009 23:21

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

Syjefroi posted:

I just moved up to version 9 today, is there any way to get my old view back? I liked having windows for genre, artist, and album. There are too many screens now to browse around and find something I want, and making a playlist for every album is a waste of my time. I can't seem to find the option anywhere, what am I missing?

View -> Column Browser?

# ¿ Nov 3, 2009 23:37

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

buzzsaw.gif posted:

Is there a good way to get rid of duplicate songs? I just did a clean install and now I find out that I have like 5 copies of everything...it's like 20K songs now

I think that in this case you're better of just clearing your library and adding everything again.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2009 19:49

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

EC posted:

I'm not sure I'll ever be OK with iTunes having that much control over my library. That plus the fact that it only has about a tenth of my library now due to performance issues scares me away from doing that. I tried moving an album, but iTunes just puts an exclamation mark beside it and goes about it's business.

I wish there was a way to export/import metadata. Or at least sync ratings to the ID3 tags and have iTunes reimport that info.

If you let Itunes manage it you wont have such problems anymore. You can even point to a specific directory you want Itunes to place all your music. There is no reason not to let it manage the library. Unless you insist on having a specific directory layout i guess.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2009 00:37

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

I'm having a problem with album artwork. Specifically, Itunes sometimes decides to suddenly change the artwork to this:

Things i've tried to fix it:
- Removing it through Itunes' rightclick menu does nothing.
- removing it by editting the tags and telling itunes to keep the artwork blank doesn't work either
- tried manually removing the artwork from each song. Itunes will just reinsert the broken artwork as soon as i click on OK.
- Tried adding new artwork from my harddrive. This works sometimes, but some albums refuse to change.
- removed all artwork itunes kept in the Documents & Settings/Itunes map. this cleared all artwork, except the ones which are like in the picture.

So, i'm really out of things to try. :negative:

# ¿ Oct 11, 2010 10:50

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

IUG posted:

Re-import the songs(?), and then try to work on the artwork? It seems like for me, for video, that there is a video or two that just won't accept artwork, and my next step was going to be to try to re-encode the video.

Ah yes, tried that as well, forgot to mention. The artwork stays the same even after re-importing. The weird thing is that itunes did show the artwork correct, but suddenly decided to corrupt it. I guess ripping the albums again is the only solution.

9-Volt Assault fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Oct 11, 2010

# ¿ Oct 11, 2010 17:11

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 21:52

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.

I guess it was an ID3 problem yes. Removing the Id3-tags completely with Foobar seems to solve it so far, as Itunes was apparently unable to remove the tags completely.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2010 21:58

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The iTunes thread: iTunes version <insert number> is out: Tell us how much you hate it