ITunes questions

Funkmasterr · Post by **Funkmasterr** » June 13, 2008, 7:55 pm

Hey, my girlfriend wants to get my music on her Ipod, and eventually I'm going to get one too. I have two questions for the ITunes folks here.

1 - Am I going to run into any issues using two different IPods on one computer?

2- I started to try and import all my music into ITunes, and it wanted to convert the .WMA songs into .AAC files. I don't want to do this if .AAC won't play in windows media player, because I don't intend on ITunes being a replacement for it. Am I going to have an issue there?

Thanks

noel · Post by **noel** » June 13, 2008, 10:01 pm

1. My wife occasionally asks me to put music on her iPod. I use my Mac to synch, both her Project:Red Nano, and my Black Nano. I believe it keeps track of which playlists are associated with which iPod, but I can't remember for sure. I am sure that it knows the difference between the two and actually displays the color difference of each iPod's body in the UI. So I believe it should work for you. The only issue would be selecting which playlists synch before synching, and even that might be taken care of for you.

2. You're basically forced here. iPod's can't play WMA files at all, so if you want to use both formats, you'll basically have to have one of each file on your PC. One for your iPods and one for your windows media playing.

I highly, highly recommend you give iTunes a shot. I personally didn't like it at first and didn't want to use it. I ended up forcing myself for just a bit, and now I actually love it. I've actually gone through and taken the time to properly label every item in my library so it's extremely searchable and useful. If you have any questions about a specific feature, I'd be more than happy to help you.

Funkmasterr · Post by **Funkmasterr** » June 13, 2008, 10:29 pm

noel wrote:1. My wife occasionally asks me to put music on her iPod. I use my Mac to synch, both her Project:Red Nano, and my Black Nano. I believe it keeps track of which playlists are associated with which iPod, but I can't remember for sure. I am sure that it knows the difference between the two and actually displays the color difference of each iPod's body in the UI. So I believe it should work for you. The only issue would be selecting which playlists synch before synching, and even that might be taken care of for you.

2. You're basically forced here. iPod's can't play WMA files at all, so if you want to use both formats, you'll basically have to have one of each file on your PC. One for your iPods and one for your windows media playing.

I highly, highly recommend you give iTunes a shot. I personally didn't like it at first and didn't want to use it. I ended up forcing myself for just a bit, and now I actually love it. I've actually gone through and taken the time to properly label every item in my library so it's extremely searchable and useful. If you have any questions about a specific feature, I'd be more than happy to help you.

Thanks a lot man. Maybe I will give it a shot too. I have also gone through and labeled damn near all of my music files properly too, which has been exhausting!

Spang · Post by **Spang** » June 13, 2008, 10:36 pm

Within iTunes click on:

Edit ->Preferences -> Advanced -> Importing -> Import Using: MP3 Encoder

That should make your music Kosher with Windows Media and iTunes.

Funkmasterr · Post by **Funkmasterr** » June 13, 2008, 10:39 pm

Spang wrote:Within iTunes click on:

Edit ->Preferences -> Advanced -> Importing -> Import Using: MP3 Encoder

That should make your music Kosher with Windows Media and iTunes.

Even better, thanks again sirs!

noel · Post by **noel** » June 14, 2008, 10:40 am

Yeah I was gonna mention that if you keep all your music in MP3 format, you'll be able to move everything back and forth between them. The bad part of that is that MP3s have less compression to achieve higher quality than WMA or AAC, so what you 'lose' for not choosing one app over the other and keeping all your music in MP3 format is disk space.

iTunes will work best for you if you

Allow it to manage your music directories:
* once you're familiar with how it will handle this, it's not a big deal at all
* of key import is the manner in which it handles compilations vs. non

Also, for changing ID3 tags in bulk, iTunes is pretty damn good. Select the ones you want, like you would windows files (with Ctrl-clicking for individual out of order files or Shift clicking to select a range), then either right-click or Ctrl-I (pretty sure it's Ctrl-I) and choose 'Get Info'. You can use this to do bulk modifications on the music. This is useful if you want say, every type of Rap in the same genre, or maybe broken down into the various sub-genres of Rap, Hip-Hop, etc. Or you import some new-to-your-library, non-purchased music, and you need to hand-input the correct ID3 tags. Also useful if you want to set up the album artwork for each piece of music so that 'Coverflow' works (Amazon.com is a good place to get the album artwork if you don't have it or if iTunes doesn't find the right one in their database). If you haven't taken the time to acquire all the album artwork, coverflow is really a useless feature, and even then, it's really only for showing off.

In my library, every item has the correct Artist, Album Song titles, track number, disc number (for multi-disc albums or compilations), Genre and Album Artwork. A lot of the music I've purchased has additional information, but the above are the ones that are important to me.

The other key point is the difference between 'smart playlists' and 'playlists'.

Smart Playlists - Automatically updating playlists. You select the criteria, and iTunes always keeps the Smart Playlist up to date. i.e. you might want a playlist that has all of the Kanye West songs in your library. So you create a smart playlist, add the criteria 'Artist' 'Kanye West' (iTunes will auto-fill the fields as you type). From that point on, the playlist will stay up to date with every Kanye song in your library. If you buy a new album from him, it will be automatically added. I mostly use smart playlists for the times when I buy a new album and want to listen to it. It's the fastest way to create a playlist with all the songs in the album.

Playlists - Standard playlist where you drag and drop whatever you like into it in any order you like.

Finally, learn to love that little 'eye' icon that I think is in the lower-right of the iTunes UI. It basically drops down 3 boxes from the top of your library windows where you can filter your library by Genre, Artist and Album. So if you're looking for something specific, you can find it quickly. One thing that always annoys the shit out of me is when I find that I've purchased some music and suddenly a new and useless genre has been introduced into my library. For example, I see that at present a few pieces of music I've introduced have the Genre of 'Alternative & Punk' (this is the fault of the artist/label btw). I don't care to track it to that level of detail, looking at the titles, I see that it's really just 'Rock' or 'Alternative'. I use the artist box and look up the artists, see that they're mostly under 'Alternative' go back and move the newer songs over from 'Alternative & Punk' to just 'Alternative' so that they match the artists other songs that are already in my Library.

It does definitely take some getting used to, but again once you understand how it works, it really does work well.

Funkmasterr · Post by **Funkmasterr** » June 14, 2008, 4:13 pm

noel wrote:Yeah I was gonna mention that if you keep all your music in MP3 format, you'll be able to move everything back and forth between them. The bad part of that is that MP3s have less compression to achieve higher quality than WMA or AAC, so what you 'lose' for not choosing one app over the other and keeping all your music in MP3 format is disk space.

iTunes will work best for you if you

Allow it to manage your music directories:
* once you're familiar with how it will handle this, it's not a big deal at all
* of key import is the manner in which it handles compilations vs. non

Also, for changing ID3 tags in bulk, iTunes is pretty damn good. Select the ones you want, like you would windows files (with Ctrl-clicking for individual out of order files or Shift clicking to select a range), then either right-click or Ctrl-I (pretty sure it's Ctrl-I) and choose 'Get Info'. You can use this to do bulk modifications on the music. This is useful if you want say, every type of Rap in the same genre, or maybe broken down into the various sub-genres of Rap, Hip-Hop, etc. Or you import some new-to-your-library, non-purchased music, and you need to hand-input the correct ID3 tags. Also useful if you want to set up the album artwork for each piece of music so that 'Coverflow' works (Amazon.com is a good place to get the album artwork if you don't have it or if iTunes doesn't find the right one in their database). If you haven't taken the time to acquire all the album artwork, coverflow is really a useless feature, and even then, it's really only for showing off. In my library, every item has the correct Artist, Album Song titles, track number, disc number (for multi-disc albums or compilations), Genre and Album Artwork. A lot of the music I've purchased has additional information, but the above are the ones that are important to me.

The other key point is the difference between 'smart playlists' and 'playlists'.

Smart Playlists - Automatically updating playlists. You select the criteria, and iTunes always keeps the Smart Playlist up to date. i.e. you might want a playlist that has all of the Kanye West songs in your library. So you create a smart playlist, add the criteria 'Artist' 'Kanye West' (iTunes will auto-fill the fields as you type). From that point on, the playlist will stay up to date with every Kanye song in your library. If you buy a new album from him, it will be automatically added. I mostly use smart playlists for the times when I buy a new album and want to listen to it. It's the fastest way to create a playlist with all the songs in the album.

Playlists - Standard playlist where you drag and drop whatever you like into it in any order you like.

Finally, learn to love that little 'eye' icon that I think is in the lower-right of the iTunes UI. It basically drops down 3 boxes from the top of your library windows where you can filter your library by Genre, Artist and Album. So if you're looking for something specific, you can find it quickly. One thing that always annoys the shit out of me is when I find that I've purchased some music and suddenly a new and useless genre has been introduced into my library. For example, I see that at present a few pieces of music I've introduced have the Genre of 'Alternative & Punk' (this is the fault of the artist/label btw). I don't care to track it to that level of detail, looking at the titles, I see that it's really just 'Rock' or 'Alternative'. I use the artist box and look up the artists, see that they're mostly under 'Alternative' go back and move the newer songs over from 'Alternative & Punk' to just 'Alternative' so that they match the artists other songs that are already in my Library.

It does definitely take some getting used to, but again once you understand how it works, it really does work well.

I think I can get used to using it, it will just take some time. I imported all of my music today, and besides .WMA files that need to be converted (I don't have enough space on my HD to convert them

) , I got them all imported. About 10k songs right now, and I would say I probably have 750-1k songs that need all the info added (album, song, artist, etc) and probably quite a few more that have all that info but just need it adjusted a bit. This is gonna be a ongoing project for a few months probably!

Do you have ITunes change the file name when you change the name in ITunes too?

Thanks for the help man.

EDIT: I guess if I'm feeling bad about re naming those files, I can just think about the 850 cd's that I will have to rip onto my computer and add to ITunes at some point..

, I'm never gonna be done with this.

Fash · Post by **Fash** » June 14, 2008, 6:13 pm

Wait till you get on an Album Art kick and spend days putting a picture on everything. At least they make it easy (select the songs and drag/drop any image onto the album art box)

CoverFlow is

Funkmasterr · Post by **Funkmasterr** » June 14, 2008, 6:28 pm

Fash wrote:Wait till you get on an Album Art kick and spend days putting a picture on everything. At least they make it easy (select the songs and drag/drop any image onto the album art box)

CoverFlow is

Haha, I can see myself doing that too.

Another question:

My girlfriend only has a Nano and a 30GB Ipod, so how does she just pick which songs she wants to put on there and not sync all the music since it won't all fit? Do you have to use playlists to do that?

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » June 14, 2008, 6:33 pm

Funkmasterr wrote:
Another question:

My girlfriend only has a Nano and a 30GB Ipod, so how does she just pick which songs she wants to put on there and not sync all the music since it won't all fit? Do you have to use playlists to do that?

When you need to sync to more than on iPod using the same library, iTunes has options for what you would like to sync. For music, you can select specific playlists to only be sync'd to a specific iPod. So, make up a new playlist for each iPod. songs can be in multiple playlists so it's not a big deal.

Funkmasterr · Post by **Funkmasterr** » June 14, 2008, 6:40 pm

Winnow wrote:
Funkmasterr wrote:
Another question:

My girlfriend only has a Nano and a 30GB Ipod, so how does she just pick which songs she wants to put on there and not sync all the music since it won't all fit? Do you have to use playlists to do that?

When you need to sync to more than on iPod using the same library, iTunes has options for what you would like to sync. For music, you can select specific playlists to only be sync'd to a specific iPod. So, make up a new playlist for each iPod. songs can be in multiple playlists so it's not a big deal.

Sweet, thanks! But you beat me before I could edit my post and add another question

What is this directory for? C:\Documents and Settings\USER\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music ?

Does ITunes actually make a second copy of all the songs and save it in that directory? I got a message saying there wasn't enough space for something to be saved when I was importing music, so I guess that would make sense. If so, that kinda sucks, might as well delete the original copies at that point.

I really need to go buy a new HD..

Fash · Post by **Fash** » June 14, 2008, 7:49 pm

There are options for where to put the Itunes library, whether or not Itunes manages the folders, and whether or not Itunes should copy the music to the library from where you imported.

As for syncing multiple iPods, I turn off Automatic Sync and drag what I want to the iPod.. You can have as many iPods as you wish, each maintains its own sync settings.

noel · Post by **noel** » June 14, 2008, 7:52 pm

Yeah, normally the first thing I'd do on XP or Vista was point iTunes to just the standard /user/Music or /My Documents/My Music/ folder.

Otherwise it will put it there.

One thing you'll definitely want to do in a Windows environment, and I will make no bones about this being a total pain in the ass, is go through after you've got everything titled and tagged the way you want, and delete the empty folders/directories where music used to be. Itunes keeps the music organized as /Itunes Music/Artist/Album/<songs>, so if you correct an artist name, or an album name, it correctly moves the music into the proper folder, but it doesn't delete the empty folder.

All of this stuff is only a pain in the ass when you first start using it, because yeah... you have 10k songs or whatever, and you're trying to address little tagging/directory issues with all of them. Once you're done with that and up and running though, everything is managed for you and it's all good.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » June 14, 2008, 8:25 pm

Funkmasterr wrote: What is this directory for? C:\Documents and Settings\USER\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music ?

I moved my iTunes music folder to a separate partition because I didn't want my main OS partition that I back up on a regular basis being bloated with songs. Even though I moved my actual music to another drive, iTunes still looks in that original location for the index file.

Ashur · Post by **Ashur** » June 17, 2008, 11:11 am

I'm just amazed you people have ten thousand songs on your PCs. If each song were 3 minutes long that's enough for 500 hours of straight music, that's 20 days, 20 hours of unique songs (24x7).

That seems like a LOT to me...

Post by **Sylvus** » June 17, 2008, 11:22 am

I'm approaching 110 gb of music and around 20k songs, and I have spent countless hours organizing everything.

I cannot stress how helpful MusicBrainz Picard is for automatically tagging files, renaming the files to be a standard format, etc. Install the Cover Art Downloader plugin found on this page, and it'll save you a lot of work.

When Picard didn't cover everything, I also downloaded MP3Tag, which made it really easy to manually search and import cover art from freedb, amazon, etc.

Then, all you need to do is buy a 160 GB iPod Classic, get an Alpine iDA-X100 in your car, and thank me later.

Ashur · Post by **Ashur** » June 17, 2008, 11:39 am

Freaks! All of you!

Funkmasterr · Post by **Funkmasterr** » June 17, 2008, 11:50 am

Ashur wrote:I'm just amazed you people have ten thousand songs on your PCs. If each song were 3 minutes long that's enough for 500 hours of straight music, that's 20 days, 20 hours of unique songs (24x7).

That seems like a LOT to me...

I'll bump up to about 25k-30k songs when I rip all my cd's, and then when I get a new HD I need to beef up my classic rock collection which will probably put me closer to 40k songs/200GB!

Sylvus wrote:I'm approaching 110 gb of music and around 20k songs, and I have spent countless hours organizing everything.

I cannot stress how helpful MusicBrainz Picard is for automatically tagging files, renaming the files to be a standard format, etc. Install the Cover Art Downloader plugin found on this page, and it'll save you a lot of work.

When Picard didn't cover everything, I also downloaded MP3Tag, which made it really easy to manually search and import cover art from freedb, amazon, etc.

Then, all you need to do is buy a 160 GB iPod Classic, get an Alpine iDA-X100 in your car, and thank me later.

I read the page on MusicBrainz Picard - does that only work for full albums? I'd say about 60% or more of my collection is not full albums, but this would still help for the other 40% or so!

I already planned on the 160GB Ipod, and I had considered a new deck.. I have just not been a fan of putting in aftermarket deck's mainly because I like how my dash looks and how my steering wheel controls work and don't want to fuck that up! Then again, if I stay factory my only choice really is to use a FM tuner which kinda sucks. That deck does look nice, have you used it much?

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » June 17, 2008, 12:00 pm

Sylvus wrote:I cannot stress how helpful MusicBrainz Picard is for automatically tagging files, renaming the files to be a standard format, etc. Install the Cover Art Downloader plugin found on this page, and it'll save you a lot of work.

When Picard didn't cover everything, I also downloaded MP3Tag, which made it really easy to manually search and import cover art from freedb, amazon, etc.

I had been contemplating posting a thread almost like this one for a couple weeks. I was just waiting until I tried a couple things out first

About the Musicbrainz software. Does it give you an option to accept/reject changes? The main thing that has held me back from trying something like this would be that I have a lot of dance music that probably won't tag at all due to being limited availability remixes/white labels or just being available in multiple places. I don't want to have them renamed to be something entirely incorrect.

Aardor · Post by **Aardor** » June 17, 2008, 12:03 pm

Funkmasterr wrote: I already planned on the 160GB Ipod, and I had considered a new deck.. I have just not been a fan of putting in aftermarket deck's mainly because I like how my dash looks and how my steering wheel controls work and don't want to fuck that up! Then again, if I stay factory my only choice really is to use a FM tuner which kinda sucks. That deck does look nice, have you used it much?

For keeping steering wheel controls, the people on the BMW forums I read use one of these: http://www.pac-audio.com/products/produ ... 0Interface . You would probably need to search forums for which one is right for you / install guide, but for BMW they are pretty easy to install and work great.

The other problem can be trim. For a long time, the only trim that didn't make your car look terrible was $100+, at least for e46 BMWs. The cheaper trim did not center your radio, and made it look completely terrible.

Post by **Sylvus** » June 17, 2008, 12:05 pm

Funkmasterr wrote:I read the page on MusicBrainz Picard - does that only work for full albums? I'd say about 60% or more of my collection is not full albums, but this would still help for the other 40% or so!

I already planned on the 160GB Ipod, and I had considered a new deck.. I have just not been a fan of putting in aftermarket deck's mainly because I like how my dash looks and how my steering wheel controls work and don't want to fuck that up! Then again, if I stay factory my only choice really is to use a FM tuner which kinda sucks. That deck does look nice, have you used it much?

Picard will work for individual songs, though sometimes it'll try to put a song into a Various Artists compilation or "Totally 80s" disc, or whatever, if you don't have the full album. So I'd say it works with a lot less supervision if you're doing full albums, but is still good for individual songs with a little babysitting.

I actually have the prior year's version of that deck, and I've used it quite a bit. I believe the main difference between the two is that last year's has a separate enter button to the left of the wheel/search button in the middle, and the one I linked uses the same button so it's more like the ipod wheel. I have the USB cable running to my glove box, and just leave my iPod in there most of the time.

While it's not the best (at least last year's) for trying to navigate through 20k songs while I'm driving my car, it works great for playlists that I've previously setup via iTunes, or if I want to do one on the go, I usually just unplug my iPod real quick, set up an "on the go" playlist, and plug it back in and it'll play it just fine.

I also had steering wheel controls that were disconnected when this was installed, and I actually got used to it pretty quickly. They have adapter kits that I think were like $50-100 (and this was at a car stereo place, if you could/would do it yourself you could probably get it much cheaper) that will connect this deck to your steering wheel controls. I would have bought them but they were out-of-stock the day I went in, and I wanted it installed right away.

Funkmasterr · Post by **Funkmasterr** » June 17, 2008, 12:16 pm

I should have done all this sooner, who knew you guys would be such a fountain of useful infoz!

Post by **Sylvus** » June 17, 2008, 12:23 pm

Boogahz wrote:About the Musicbrainz software. Does it give you an option to accept/reject changes? The main thing that has held me back from trying something like this would be that I have a lot of dance music that probably won't tag at all due to being limited availability remixes/white labels or just being available in multiple places. I don't want to have them renamed to be something entirely incorrect.

Yeah, the way that it works is this: you drag a folder containing as many subfolders/songs/albums as you want into the left pane of Picard, click one button and it'll work it's magic and try to identify them as best it can and show them in the right pane. You click another on whatever you have highlighted on the right to commit those changes. You can set options for the commit to just write tags, or to write tags and rename files and organize them in a directory structure as best you like. Personally, I have a music folder that contains an "albums" folder and a "singles" folder, and from there I break them down into artist and then album.

Because it's comparing the accoustic fingerprints or whatever to a database, sometimes a particular mp3 you have won't match exactly. As long as it's above a user-defined threshold (X% matches), it'll say "okay, this song matches track 3 of this album" and set it to be track 3. For those that it can't match, it'll create a sub-listing of "unknown tracks" or somesuch, and throw those in there. So an album might have 10 tracks, and you can see that 7 of your tracks matched and 3 are in the unknown listing, and if you know that one of them was track 6, you just drag it up into the empty track 6 slot.

Once you're confident that everything's good to go, you click the button that actually writes the tags. If it mis-identified the album, you can click lookup on the bottom, and it'll open your browser and search their database. If there's an album that is a better fit for what you want, you click the "tagger" link in your browser and it'll import it into Picard, and you can just drag and drop those files into the new listing you just brought over. It was kind of confusing for me at first, but after playing with it for about an hour, it was really easy to use.

Ashur · Post by **Ashur** » June 17, 2008, 1:50 pm

Sylvus wrote:[...]you drag a folder containing as many subfolders/songs/albums as you want into the left pane of Picard, click one button and it'll work it's magic and try to identify them as best it can and show them in the right pane. You click another on whatever you have highlighted on the right to commit those changes. You can set options for the commit to just write tags, or to write tags and rename files and organize them in a directory structure as best you like.

That sounds pretty neat! Does it work with only MP3 formatted files or does it work with MP4 or whatever the fuck Apple uses in ITunes as well?

Post by **Sylvus** » June 17, 2008, 1:57 pm

Ashur wrote:
Sylvus wrote:[...]you drag a folder containing as many subfolders/songs/albums as you want into the left pane of Picard, click one button and it'll work it's magic and try to identify them as best it can and show them in the right pane. You click another on whatever you have highlighted on the right to commit those changes. You can set options for the commit to just write tags, or to write tags and rename files and organize them in a directory structure as best you like.
That sounds pretty neat! Does it work with only MP3 formatted files or does it work with MP4 or whatever the fuck Apple uses in ITunes as well?

I don't know about that, I mostly only deal with MP3 files. I *think* it might have worked on a few FLAC files I had, but don't quote me on that.

Aardor · Post by **Aardor** » July 22, 2008, 6:15 pm

So yesterday, I opened Itunes, and for some reason, every one of my songs was listed twice. I did not have 2 copies of any song on my hard drive.

After googling for awhile, the Apple method of resolving this was found to be: select Itunes to show duplicates, delete the duplicates manually. This was quite unacceptable because i didn't want to have to go through and delete 5972 files. Finally, I deleted my itunes folder, and readded the folder to the library. This worked, but then it had to redownload all my album artwork, which took awhile, but was only a minor inconvenience.

This is what drives me nuts about Itunes...If this happened in foobar, i could just select to have it refresh my library. Nothing similar exists in Itunes, hell, you can't even see what folders are in your library! I am trying really hard to convert to using Itunes, but crap like this enrages me.

noel · Post by **noel** » July 22, 2008, 8:17 pm

Not trying to be harsh or make any kind of excuse for iTunes here but...

Backups are your friend.

When people start to realize that they've now got hundreds of dollars of music and the time it takes to organize it invested in their computers... Data that takes up tens to hundreds of gigs... Backup is going to start to become more and more important. In the past, if a drive failed, you lost some documents and some pictures. Maybe you hadn't changed the data in sometime and it's not a big deal. Now you're maybe adding music (and movies and pictures) to your data on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. You need a backup solution that will protect you from shit like this.

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » July 22, 2008, 8:54 pm

noel wrote:Not trying to be harsh or make any kind of excuse for iTunes here but...

Backups are your friend.

When people start to realize that they've now got hundreds of dollars of music and the time it takes to organize it invested in their computers... Data that takes up tens to hundreds of gigs... Backup is going to start to become more and more important. In the past, if a drive failed, you lost some documents and some pictures. Maybe you hadn't changed the data in sometime and it's not a big deal. Now you're maybe adding music (and movies and pictures) to your data on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. You need a backup solution that will protect you from shit like this.

erm, his files did not get deleted. iTunes just duplicated them. I'm not trying to be rude with this, but how would backing up 10 gigs of music fix his issue? The only issue I have had like this has involved the iTunes library file getting fubar'd, and backing my music up has nothing to do with preventing that.

noel · Post by **noel** » July 22, 2008, 8:59 pm

Pretty simple to clean out the music directory and reload the one that didn't have all the duplicates.

Also, given that it's highly unlikely the music was actually duplicated... just the links in the software to the files (like two shortcuts to the same thing on your desktop), he could have just restored the xml file that keeps track of all of that that's in the same directory as the rest of his iTunes library.

I'd imagine you'd have figured that out given that my whole post was about backing up that data, but I guess I was wrong.

For the record, my data is backed up weekly, daily and hourly.

Canelek · Post by **Canelek** » July 22, 2008, 9:08 pm

Other than the retardedness that is iTunes, I cannot stand the Apple commercials with the chubby dork and the skinny pointy-haired metro-hipster. I would like to flog them both with meatclubs.

That said, I am going to buy a iPhone, as soon as I figure out a way around AT&T's "upgrade" program. *murder*

Aardor · Post by **Aardor** » July 22, 2008, 11:39 pm

edit see below

Aardor · Post by **Aardor** » July 22, 2008, 11:44 pm

edit: Oh, back up that file. Yeah, I probably should have done that, but still, why the fuck can't you refresh the library? I just added a new album to my music folder, and itunes is only picking up half the songs, which is actually more annoying than just some of the songs.

Edit 2: holy crap, i restarted itunes (even though i started it way after the files had been moved into the music directory), and now it has duplicates for the half of the songs that showed up the first time. Maybe i should just let itunes control my music folder? Think that would help?

Aardor · Post by **Aardor** » July 22, 2008, 11:49 pm

Oh, another question: Is there any way to smooth the scrolling in Itunes? I'm running it on a pretty fast computer (3.4ghz 4 gb ram 2x ati 4850's), and the scrolling feels lagged on everything.

noel · Post by **noel** » July 23, 2008, 12:36 am

I always let iTunes control my music folder, and I've never had an issue with it doing so.

That said...

Folder controls will work perfectly if your ID3 tags are correct. Mostly just Artist and Album name. Allow it to control the folders, import your music, make sure all the ID3s are correct, then go actually look at the folders to see what it's doing.

After you understand how it's controlling them, it's really no issue. The only quirky thing is the manner in which it handles compilations, but again once you're familiar with it, it's no big deal.

Also, under Windows, it doesn't cleanup the folders it moves the music out of (this is a limitation of the file system more than iTunes -- arguably Apple should code around it).

Aardor · Post by **Aardor** » July 23, 2008, 1:00 am

Yeah, I had my Music pretty well organized as \Artist\Album\Songs, so I figured I would stick with it. Is there any way to get FLAC files to play in windows?

Fash · Post by **Fash** » July 23, 2008, 1:02 am

VLC plays FLAC (and just about everything else, video or audio)

Aardor · Post by **Aardor** » July 23, 2008, 1:21 am

Fash wrote:VLC plays FLAC (and just about everything else, video or audio)

Er... I meant, is there anyway to get the Windows version of Itunes to play FLAC files?

Fash · Post by **Fash** » July 23, 2008, 1:58 am

Aardor wrote:
Fash wrote:VLC plays FLAC (and just about everything else, video or audio)
Er... I meant, is there anyway to get the Windows version of Itunes to play FLAC files?

Ah.. in that case: No, there is not.

Tyek · Post by **Tyek** » July 23, 2008, 2:01 am

you have to convert them to play in Itunes. There are several free programs that can convert them for you. I had to clean up the names after for the itunes library, but otherwise it is pretty straightforward.

Post by **Sylvus** » July 23, 2008, 11:14 am

Aardor wrote:Finally, I deleted my itunes folder, and readded the folder to the library. This worked, but then it had to re-download all my album artwork, which took awhile, but was only a minor inconvenience.

It's a bit of a pain in the ass, but I recommend going through your mp3s in a different program (Picard, MP3Tag, etc) and adding the album artwork to your ID3 tags. It increases the filesize of each mp3 a little bit, but then the album artwork will appear in whatever program you open the files in. If you ever need to re-import your whole library to iTunes (which I've done a few times with ~18,000 songs), it makes life so much easier and takes several hours less.

Aardor · Post by **Aardor** » July 23, 2008, 11:30 am

Tyek wrote:you have to convert them to play in Itunes. There are several free programs that can convert them for you. I had to clean up the names after for the itunes library, but otherwise it is pretty straightforward.

ehhh... I have them in MP3 already, I just like listening to FLAC for the loseless audio.

It's a bit of a pain in the ass, but I recommend going through your mp3s in a different program (Picard, MP3Tag, etc) and adding the album artwork to your ID3 tags. It increases the filesize of each mp3 a little bit, but then the album artwork will appear in whatever program you open the files in. If you ever need to re-import your whole library to iTunes (which I've done a few times with ~18,000 songs), it makes life so much easier and takes several hours less.

Yeah, I fixed 95% of my mp3's audio tags a long time ago with Picard and TagAndRename, I guess the artwork part wasn't included in the program yet.

Few questions:

If I let Itunes control my music folder, will it try to convert my entire library to an itunes format, or will it just move (or copy) my mp3s into it's directory structure?

And anyone know about the scrolling? It just feels like the program has lag on any screen, most notably cover flow. Compared to my Itouch, you would think I was running itunes on a 486.

Funkmasterr · Post by **Funkmasterr** » July 23, 2008, 11:38 am

If you let it control your library, it will try to convert anything that isn't .M4A , .MP3 or .AAC. However, you can change the settings in iTunes to choose which of those file types it converts them to (.AAC is default, and I'm guessing you don't want that anymore than I did.)

I have noticed this duplication thing with the last two computers I've worked on recently.. A bug with the newest update, maybe?

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » July 23, 2008, 2:06 pm

Use Media Monkey as your music manager. It's free and awesome (there may be a pro version that costs more)

I use iTunes for podcasts and adding select music to my ipod but Media Monkey is better as an actual database for your collection.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/

Funkmasterr · Post by **Funkmasterr** » July 23, 2008, 2:45 pm

Winnow wrote:Use Media Monkey as your music manager. It's free and awesome (there may be a pro version that costs more)

I use iTunes for podcasts and adding select music to my ipod but Media Monkey is better as an actual database for your collection.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/

I don't really see the need for multiple programs to manage my library (which is now in the neighborhood of 25k songs). I will say, the few times I have had to look for a folder that a song is in now that itunes is managing things for me, it has been kind of frustrating. But the only reason for this is I haven't named my unknowns yet, I haven't edited all the artists for name consistency (Snoop Doggy Dogg vs. Snoop Dogg, for example), and I haven't deleted all the empty folders.

Once that is all done, it will be very easy for me to navigate to all my music if a friend wants me to burn something or whatever.

To give you an idea, out of the 15k or so songs I have downloaded, only about 1500 weren't able to be named and tagged properly by itunes. I think that is pretty acceptable.

Post by **Sylvus** » August 7, 2008, 11:43 am

Here's an iTunes question for you guys:

I recently backed up my girlfriend's data, reformatted and reinstalled everything, and copied her data back over. She had bought a few things from the iTunes store, and now (due to the DRM) it won't copy to her iPod anymore. Is there a process to go about transferring the DRM from her old install of iTunes to her new install?

Thanks

Fairweather Pure · Post by **Fairweather Pure** » August 7, 2008, 11:50 am

Sylvus wrote:I recently backed up my girlfriend's data

HEYO!

As far as your Itunes question, I suggest inventing the flux capacitor, installing it in your Delorean, and then going back in time to never ever have anything to do with Itunes.

(I have nothing to contribute to this conversation other than my deep hatred for DRM and anything Apple.)

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » August 7, 2008, 11:50 am

There should be an option to authorize another computer. I know I had to do it when I moved my songs from one computer to another that was being used mainly as a media player. I will try to remember to check where exactly the option is when I get home.

miir · Post by **miir** » August 7, 2008, 12:07 pm

If the DRM media have been registered 5 times, you're gonna have to deauthorize all computers then reauthorize them.

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/sto ... orization/

Post by **Sylvus** » August 7, 2008, 12:33 pm

Okay, so per that faq, it looks as if she just needs to play the music through iTunes to authorize it for her computer?

When I was trying to sync her iPod, I got a message saying it wasn't authorized. I'm sure she doesn't have this authorized on any computers other than the 'old' instance of Windows that I formatted.

miir · Post by **miir** » August 7, 2008, 12:44 pm

If she is trying to synch the current music on her ipod with the library on her (new) PC it just won't work... well I have never found a way for it to work reliably.

I always end up wiping my ipod, reauthorizing the DRM protected media on my (new) computer and loading my ipod with the music I want.