iTunes ?

Also, I really like the new album artwork feature.

guess i should go an' download this new iTunes, then.

to spite apple, i'm going to set up my PB5300 in the kitchen while i cook dinner, and use that for a bit instead. fuckers!

muchas gracias!

not my iMac. (did i mention that here? no, hang on, that was on ILE.) anyway, it makes a total cock of the whole thing. will post screenshots later if i can be arsed. (nb: i'm sure it's not an OS-related thing; it'll be a basic graphics-related thing. BUT STILL.)

... wow, it's amazing what half a bottle of red wine can do for yr mac-related woes, innit?

sorry :)

MusicBrainz Album Artist Identifier

The MusicBrainz Album Artist Id is used to store an artist identifier for the album the track is on. This is only for VariousArtistsReleases where the tracks have multiple different artists and the album itself is by the special artist VariousArtists with ArtistID 89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377.

so, er, clear as mud. anyone?

Albums without album artists will not show up in MCE right or will not be detected probably by WMP. WMP relies on the fact that all albums have an album artist. Compilation albums also have an album artist: Various Artists. Although all tracks can have their separate track artists, the album artist is a must have. The Album Artist is also essential for the location of the tracks.

so i guess it's to allow ppl to import existing WMP libraries into iTunes.

with foobar2000, we use this for mixes, eg:

Album: Boogy Bytes Vol 1
Tracknumber: 1
Artist: Fred Giannelli
Title: Distant Gratification
Album Artist: Kiki

I had this issue last night playing clips from the store- closing and restarting itunes fixed it.

what's perverse about that? surely it's the obvious way to play an album in order. how else would you do it?

still, he can swivel.

by making sure the track number is entered in the id3 tag and sorting by track order

i dunno. i started my playlist thing back with iTunes v1 and i'm not giving up now :)

re: buttons. they've removed the visualiser one, haven't they? you have to turn it on from the menu (or keyboard shortcut) now.

anyone know if the MP3 encoding has improved since v4.7?

am confused -- when u upload cd, are youse saying it now uploads album artwork with it?!

agree it's more crashy than whatever i had.

-Am I the only person who has to switch on the browser thing for the iPod every time I connect it? The programe doesn't seem to remember that configuration

-For some reason I cannot turn on the "show duplicates" for the iPod library (it works for the main library though)

-although I checked the compilation box and the 'group by compilation', I keep see artists that are on compilations when browsing the iPod. How do I change that?

-the Skip count column: doesn't it keep track of songs skipped on the iPod?

is it correct that indexing my files in the library (but NOT letting iTunes (dis)organise them, ever) the cover art is now stored in a separate database, and not in the ID3 v2.3 info itself?

if so - BRILLIANT!

if still risk of fux0ring/bloating my entire mp3 collection tag info - FUCK OFF!

-Is anyone else having the problem of iTunes crashing everytime it exits?

Are you on a Mac? If so, yes, the Album Artwork gets its own folder in your iTunes Library folder. (I own both a Mac and a PC, but I've only used iTunes on the Mac.) This appears to be the case even if you let iTunes organise your files for you, which I do.

Really? Because I recently had to do backup-wipe-and-restore on my Mac (long story, not worth getting into), and none of my album artwork was visible until I replaced my new iTunes Library file with a backup...

Apparently, iTunes can interpolate displayed album art for the whole album even when, say, only the first track has an embedded image (though nothing is then physically added to the individual files), so it may also do this from the stored images in the artwork folder. I dunno. But it doesn't strip the image resource from the audio file when it builds the album art library. (I don't use the iTunes store to fetch album art, btw, so I can't speak to that.)

PC'ers try MP3 Tag and Rename (Even though I am mainly a mac user, I use that for tagging. Go to "edit all supported tag fields") and I am pretty sure Foobar (PC) can play these files back while displaying the desired info, although that is just what I have been told (I don't listen to stuff on the PC).

I have an old version of MP3 Rage for the mac but maybe the newest version supports this more "robust" level of level 2 tags. It is also possible that Audion does this too (for playback), though I haven't used it in years. I was hoping the Zune was going to try to cater to this protocol with their product but it certainly figures that they wouldn't.

I really can't figure out whether the fault lies with iTunes or my iPod, but The Game will just not show up under the 'Artists' list on my iPod. To hear any of his albums, I have to scroll through the 'Albums' list to find them by name. Seems to be the only artist this happens to. I've tried taking them off and reloading them several times.

Anyone ever encountered a similar problem?

may be tagged as a compilation

did you download software that will prevent you from listening to music from horrible artists? 'cause that might be the problem. just sayin'

Kevin, you are plannin' for a Suggest Bannin'

^^^ had been saving that one up.

okay, that was pretty funny.

I really can't figure out whether the fault lies with iTunes or my iPod, but The Game will just not show up under the 'Artists' list on my iPod. To hear any of his albums, I have to scroll through the 'Albums' list to find them by name. Seems to be the only artist this happens to. I've tried taking them off and reloading them several times.

Anyone ever encountered a similar problem?

This happens on rare occasions, but boy is it annoying when it does. Compilation tags, huh? - will check.

Can one remove these "compilation tags"? -- hella annoying.

Uncheck in get info.

Check the Album Artist field.

^^^

that's always very annoying when you look everywhere to see what's wrong and it's usually that.

WHAT????

iTunes will not let you add .wav format files to iPods anymore???//////////////!!!!!!!!!!!!

and not FLAC files either????????????????????????????????????????????///

*crying*

Not fair. Not fair. Not fair. Not fair. Fuck it all. I'll burn this shit to disc and take my boombox to bed with me. I hate you all. *baby crying* WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH

My boombox is my pacifier, now. Seriously fuck this shit. You're telling me that in order to get my most fave music onto this stupid thing called an "ipod" (which I still call "my walkman") I have to compress the sound??? Shove it up your...

Okay I'll be quiet now.

VINYL REVOLT!!!!

WE, THE VINYL ARMY WILL CARRY RECORDS AS OUR SHIELDS AND STYLUS AS OUR SWORDS AND WE SHALL OVERCOME

fuck you i wont do what you tell me

it won't? that is weird. you should be able to to apple lossless though, no prblem and no audible compression.

what do you mean I should be able to "apple"? How do I "apple"?

okay wooohoo! I've added the Dif Juz gig in wav file form to my iPod! Woohoo!!!

No damnit! It still won't play!! I HATE THE WHOLE UNIVERSE

No seriously, I went through this with Echo & The Bunnymen before. It's a total scam. iTunes hell, iPod hell. Fuck you all. Just fuck you up the butt and go buy some fucking records.

I don't think iPods have ever played FLAC files, but I always figured WAV would work. You can still use Apple Lossless or AIFF.

Switch is handy sometimes in situations like this.

I meant that you should be able to do apple lossless, of course. wav works and has always worked. it works for me now. so unless bimble has a different ipod than I do, or something weird about his set up, then I don't know why it won't work.
apple doesn't support flac

if it's your ipod that isn't accepting these, bimble, it might be because they're fucking huge. why are you using .wav files? they're like 10 times the size of a 320 mp3 at least. you won't be able to put many albums on an ipod if you have everything ripped as a .wav or .aiff.

and you'll run the battery down in about three songs' time

“this portable player specifically designed to carry lots of small compressed files isn’t very good at carrying enormous uncompressed files! it’s an outrage!”

This is like Bimble trying to get the in-tray of a CD player to close once he’s wedged an LP into it.

Heheh. I know. I kinda left this thread hanging today. I wanted to respond but ended up discarding my response. I'm well aware the files are big and you wouldn't really want everything on your iPod to be in those kinds of formats but for just a few things it seems appropriate for me. I already have the Switch program, which is how I converted the FLAC to WAV. I've fiddled around with it some more tonight to find that suddenly I can't even play the mp3's of it on my iPod (and I've tried converting to .aiff too). I've got this program now I'm trying to use to fix my iPod, though. Anyway, the problem isn't that I can't ADD the files to the iPod, it's that when they're there, they won't play.

But anyway, I'm really sick of fooling with it tonight and I'm just listening to stuff on my computer. I give up.

Anyway, the problem isn't that I can't ADD the files to the iPod, it's that when they're there, they won't play.

"I've got the CD on the turntable, but the needle keeps skating off!"

LOL

well will the files play off your computer? maybe you didn't convert them correctly.

stupid question: how do i stop itunes from alphabeticising tracklists?

Click at the top of the left-most column (next to Name).

nope.

Can't you just click the column that you want to sort by?

You can't go unsorted, if that's what you mean.

Bimble, ipods have never supported wav to my knowledge, or at least not in a few years. They didn't even support mp3 until 2004 or something.

Have you trued using itunes to convert the wavs to Apple lossless? (I can't check it myself as itunes doesn't run in Linux obv, and I cbf rebooting just for this.)

Well, when I first got my iPod last year, I was able to add a few wav files to it and play them, so I know it can be done. I suppose it's possible that iTunes updates might prevent this now though?? Anyway, yes I had considered the idea that perhaps I'm not converting the FLAC files correctly, but this seems improbable because I've tried converting them to wav, mp3 and aiff (using Switch) and none of these will play on the Pod. How do I "use iTunes to convert the wavs to apple lossless"?

change your preferences to "apple lossless", right click on the track inside itunes, choose "convert".

but anyway I'm still confused as to why you can't do this because I just put a .wav file on my ipod no problem. maybe it's a firmware issue or something. but I've always been able to add .wav files to my ipods.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA38530?viewlocale=en_US

change your preferences to "apple lossless", right click on the track inside itunes, choose "convert".

Can you be a bit more specific? I don't see anything on any of the tabs in Preferences that mentions apple lossless and when I right click on any track in iTunes I don't see an option to convert except to "convert ID3 tags" or "create AAC version".

Well fuck me, now all of a sudden I've got the wav files to play on my iPod. WTF?

They didn't even support mp3 until 2004 or something

?

My original 5GB one certainly did (indeed: it was about all it did support). Unless this is a "joke" I'm not getting, in which case I apologise.

And yes, as akm suggests, there shouldn't be a problem with .wav files playing. It's obviously a problem with Switch, Bimble -- but if you've got it working, then hurrah!

Ah, I'm wrong then.

(wow, I didn't mean to reply within 50 seconds)

god this fucking program...

so simple - yet so difficult!!

is there still no way to search by directory from within the program?

no smart playlist, nothing?

would make life so much easier....

why would you search "by directory"? what does that mean? if you use itunes to organize your library it will organize everything by artist/album anyway.

A directory setting for smart playlists would be nice because I don't have all my files in a single directory. I use a laptop and most of my files are on an external HD, which stays in the office. However, my iTunes folder on my laptop also has lots of music in it that I've recently ripped or downloaded. It'd be nice to be able to create a smart playlist based on local files (the only ones I can listen to when I am not at the office).

new iTunes upgrade will not install or run on my computer. lots of others with the same problem. none of the suggestions i've read work. do i just give up and head to the Apple store tomorrow?

i mean, it is just kind of a bitch to play all my shit off ableton.

hey there

I just downloaded Itunes 8. My wife got a new iPod that'll only accept that version.

So here's my issue, and if anyone knows the solution I'll be really thankful. What does one have to do to be able to add tracks from audio CDs to this version? Before, I'd just slide a disc into the PC - it's a Vista computer - and, if iTunes was open, I'd get a prompt asking me if I wanted to import the songs, and the songs would appear on my iTunes screen, and I'd import them. Now when I slide a disc in, I don't get that prompt, and I have no idea how to import CDs.

Oh my god you're scaring the crap out of me. I don't want that version.

hey, it may just be something with my computer...

does the cd even show up as mounted outside of itunes?

actually it doesn't! which is weird.

have you tried another CD?

on my iTunes 8, when i put in a CD a button appears in the lower-right of my iTunes window that says "Import CD"

Me too.

it sounds to me like maybe vista has some driver issue with your cd drive.

The CD should show up in the iTunes source list over on the left, regardless.

i tried a bunch of CDs.

let me look for that button...maybe i was just missing it.

"The CD should show up in the iTunes source list over on the left, regardless."

True and you should be able to select and Convert to MP3 from there as well.

Eesh, yes this sounds like a Vista / CD drive problem.

I run iTunes 8 in Vista and have never had this problem.

Nor me, but a few months of using Vista and iTunes and nothing would surprise me.

jeez louise. i restarted the damn computer and now everything's cool. i can't believe i didn't just do that in the first place!

thanks anyway, everyone!

LOL

OK i have a question

iTunes keeps track of how many "plays" a certain song has, and it also keeps track of how many "skips" it has. i think so far i have this correct.

now:

if a song is 5:48 and you skip to the next song at 5:35, does it count as a "skip" and not as a "play"?

because that would be fucking ridiculous.

it's a computer program, not a fucking mind-reading machine

of the songs i actually listen to, i probably skip 75% of them just before the end, when i know the last verse is over and it's just the wind-down, or a 20-second fade-out, or 64 bars of beats so that it can be mixed into the next track by a dj.

I have a question: When I burn a CD using iTunes, the track information isn't always retained when I play the disc on a different computer. Why not? If it shows up on one computer, shouldn't it show up on all the others?

it's a computer program, not a fucking mind-reading machine

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, January 6, 2009 2:05 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

when you burn a CD, iTunes grabs the info about it from an online database, based on the number of songs on the CD and the exact length of each song. CDs themselves don't have any information about their tracks on them. another computer may be grabbing the info from a different database, or from the same database but a different entry in that database. the Gracenote database, which i believe iTunes uses, isn't perfect.

n/a i think you will agree that in my case - and probably many others - the skip count probably closer resembles the number of actual plays than the play count does.

when you burn a CD, iTunes grabs the info about it from an online database, based on the number of songs on the CD and the exact length of each song.
That's kinda what I figured. But I still don't get why the software can't just burn the text information to go along with each track, bypassing the online database altogether. I never have this problem when burning a data disc, which retains everything without looking it up on the web.

the CD audio standard was invented a looong time ago, computer-wise

tracer just ffwd the last 20 secs or whatever rather than track skip. I do that cause I have a playlist of stuff that hasn't been played or skipped in XX weeks, but if I skip a track on my ipod, it doesn't register as a skip and therefore stays in my list of "unplayed/unskipped".

A state of the art personal computer in 1980, the year the Red Book (audio CD standard) was published:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Trs80_2.jpg

Basically, almost no metadata (artists, track names, etc) is supported by Red Book.

n/a i think you will agree that in my case - and probably many others - the skip count probably closer resembles the number of actual plays than the play count does.

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, January 6, 2009 2:31 PM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that's because it's a computer program, not a fucking mind-reading machine

last.fm scrobbly thing counts it as a 'play' after two minutes or halfway through the track, whichever is shorter. far more sensible, no mind-reading involved.

bought my eldest a cheap-n-cheerful laptop for crimbo/homework demands.
tonight he proudly told me that had installed iTunes on it.
10 minutes later that was no longer the case.
47Mb RAM useage as opposed to a much smaller memory footprint by the just as effective Media Player proved my case.
[1Gb RAM vs Vista = performance concerns]
not only that, but he hasn't got an iPod, so dont see the point when WMP will rip his 4 cds for him into mp3s for his phone.
someone convince me why he needs it ?
i suspect his reasoning is that classic case of 'everyone else has it'.
i feel like i am a bad bad dad for making his life iTunes free.

that's because it's a computer program, not a fucking mind-reading machine

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, January 6, 2009 1:31 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^ profoundops.

XP: Its a nice interface for accessing the iTunes store, and now that iTunes is going DRM free I guess that's something. As with their portable devices, I guess its fashionable, if you value that above other virtues. If the kid doesn't care about performance issues, I'd let him get fed up on his own first.

But for almost any other purpose there are better alternatives. I'm a fan of MediaMonkey, which helps me effectively manage about 35,000 mp3s in a my own file hierarchy. Apple has joined my short-list of developers I associate with bloated resource use. As with everything MS other than the OS, there are useful alternatives for QuickTime codecs (though not development, AFAIK) as well.

my gonad for an iTunes/Media Monkey merger, where MediaMonkey redoes the iTunes UI, while iTunes keeps its proprietary store services

what is your major malfunction n/a? computers are able to do lots of amazing things, like measure how long you've been listening to a track. on your ipod, it even prints this information out on a constantly updated basis. i'm pretty sure it doesn't need to read your mind to do this.

Returning a "percentage played" figure instead of a boolean "played/not played" figure is pretty low not only on the Features Users Want list, but also pretty useless from a business standpoint.

Keep in mind that I'm talking strictly UI here. iTunes DOES keep track of how much of a track you played, because there is resume functionality per media item. This may be turned on for video only for now, but it could be turned on for audio as well. It's just not that useful from a User Interface standpoint to provide it, not point out if a track was fully played or not.

And as someone else pointed out, last.fm has a compromise system. Who knows what Genius is doing in the background.

(besides probably making iTunes less robust. oh snap.)

my gonad for an iTunes/Media Monkey merger, where MediaMonkey redoes the iTunes UI, while iTunes keeps its proprietary store services

― 909090909 Rivethed Brikkchin Reverk now DANZ (Mackro Mackro), Tuesday, 6 January 2009 22:10 (1 hour ago)

OTMFM <3 MM UI (but don't forget the internal file management, all it lacks is a built in power tagger)

Don't all of the OCD folks scrobble on last.fm anyways? The last.fm client gives you a full song listening credit 1/2 way thru the song.

If the freaking click wheel worked better on my iPod, that clip might be exciting, derelict, but until then, fuck 'em.

iTunes increments play count when you play THE END of a song. Skip to -0.02 from the end and play.

I think last.fm scrobbler just picks up the ipod play count from iTunes rather than listening for two minutes or whatever.

Jazzbo- what you'll want to do is check the button in your CD burning options menu that says "use CD Text." This will let other computers and some stereos and car audio systems to load artist and track title info, even on custom mix CDs and not just copied discs.

This will let other computers and some stereos and car audio systems to load artist and track title info, even on custom mix CDs and not just copied discs.

iTunes in still not reading CD-TEXT shockah?

47Mb RAM useage as opposed to a much smaller memory footprint by the just as effective Media Player proved my case.

that's not very much RAM usage at all, how much does the machine have?

maybe i'll reinstall media monkey, didn't really like it on first use. plus points = being able to change almsot all id3 tags with 'f2' rename shortcut, rather than tedious 'right click-->info'. minus point (which i didn't investigate too much, just a first impression) was folder structure in the left-hand pane. am very happy to let itunes organise all my folders and files based on the tags.

You know that you can edit multiple ID3 tags at once, right?

what? yes? probably? i just meant e.g. 'f2' when the 'year' field is selected for a single song. no can do in itunes.

If I ever run into mass tagging jobs that iTunes can't handle, Media Rage always does the job. I guess it's Mac-only, though.

iTunes increments play count when you play THE END of a song. Skip to -0.02 from the end and play.

Haha and I actually DO THIS! Which is just retarded. I have no idea why you're all acting like I'm wishing for something MAGICAL and IMPOSSIBLE when all I want is for iTunes to be like "He listened to 2 minutes of that song, therefore he likes that song more than the song he skipped after hearing for one second".

Basically what I'm saying is that Apple needs to adjust to our CRAZY CUT UP CULTURE of BLIPVERTS and FASTVERTISING.

Tracer H, how come you keep skipping songs right at the end? That seems a bit odd to me.

I do this mainly on mixes and podcasts coz they often seem to have about thirty secs of silence at the end and I need the next banging hits straight away.

iTunes is dick though. It could easily be so much better.

Basically what I'm saying is that Apple needs to adjust to our CRAZY CUT UP CULTURE of BLIPVERTS and FASTVERTISING.

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, January 8, 2009 2:39 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the crazy thing is that this seems so obvious.

i don't know shit about programming but isn't this like the kind of thing that would take an afternoon of code writing before the next version update?

so is everything pretty much DRM-free now, or has that not happened yet?

Prob. Apple needs to insert fuzzy logic into its song counter.

if you're having issues retagging in iTunes i suggest you go to dougs apple scripts and find the good ones there. i'm using 5 or 6 of them to make tagging much, much easier.

Jazzbo- what you'll want to do is check the button in your CD burning options menu that says "use CD Text." This will let other computers and some stereos and car audio systems to load artist and track title info, even on custom mix CDs and not just copied discs.
I did. Still no workie. The disc name and all the tracks are there after the CD is burned, but disappear when I pop the disc into a different computer.
It doesn't happen all the time. Most recently, the track names weren't retained for some Beatles comps that I made. I thought maybe it was because iTunes doesn't carry the Beatles, but it should use a larger internet database, right?
Very strange.

This happens to me as well but it doesn't surprise me, I figured that since CDs don't generally hold text data (that 'CD text' thing notwithstanding) that iTunes just manages to remember data for CDs you've burnt on that particular PC. Although it's odd you say it doesn't happen all the time, perhaps it's just for copies of commerical CDs that it works? Then the CD database thing would kick in.

iTunes in still not reading CD-TEXT shockah?

― ShamPowWow (libcrypt), Wednesday, January 7, 2009 3:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Only a few CD drives support reading CD-Text RW subcodes from the program area

Also kind of weird that iTunes doesn't support automatically removing silence from the beginning and end of tracks yet. This has been a configurable output plug-in option in WinAmp and MediaMonkey for about 3 years now.

Randomly tested 2 computers and 6 apps and none of them displayed the CD-TEXT I burned a disc with, so I'll buy it.

So this is more of an iPod question than iTunes, but maybe someone has had a similar problem. Lately my iPod (160 GB classic) has developed a twitch where, every so often, it will just pause during playback. Not pause the unit itself, but it'll be playing a song then seemingly freeze up for 4-5 seconds and continue with the song. Doesn't happen frequently, but its pretty annoying when it does. It feels like the hard drive is just struggling to keep up and getting kind of sluggish. I figured resetting the unit might help, and it might have, since the clickwheel response time vastly improved. But the weird pause issue seems to continue.

Mine does that too (also iPod classic 160 gb -- but only about 95 gbs on it so far)

In my case the pause is less severe, just a half second or so.

Does it pause on all types of files? E.g., MP3, AAC, ALC, FairPlay, etc.

common problem mine does that too maybe once per hour o use. no known fix for it unfortunately.

Smack the shit out of it. hold it with the buttons against your palm and smack it as hard as you can on your other hand or leg. Sometimes this works. Seriously. There's even a website called Spank My Pod or something.

I don't the the hard drive is the issue, since the iPod should be caching songs to memory before they're played.

How long are the tracks you're playing? I've heard of iPods having issues with very large files.

Beyond resetting the unit, try reformatting/restoring it as well. That should rule out any software problem.

i accidentally loaded some large wavs onto my ipod and if i try to play one it just turns off immediately

Smack the shit out of it. hold it with the buttons against your palm and smack it as hard as you can on your other hand or leg. Sometimes this works. Seriously. There's even a website called Spank My Pod or something.

If it's a disk-based iPod, then all this is going to do is cause the platter-reading head to crash. Talk about shortening the lifespan of yr iPod!

Yeah, I can't see the wisdom in smacking a tiny hard drive around...

Can't believe anyone would advise someone to smash an iPod, especially to fix an undiagnosed problem. What a stupid piece of advice.

Any other AVG users get slammed with the false Trojan warning upon opening iTunes today/tonight? If you do, DON'T remove the threat. Open AVG, go into the Exceptions Manager and add the path for "Program Files/iTunes" and close all the windows, iTunes should open just fine after that.

I think iTunes just broke my optical drive. I was using it to burn a CD, when all of a sudden it just stopped, gave the doodly-beep "all done" sound, and now Shit Is Fucked Up- I can open the disc in windows explorer (where I see it only burned the first track), but iTunes won't recognize that there's a disc in the drive at all, and I can't eject it, either with the actual button or through iTunes or explorer.

Has anyone tried out Mojo, the file sharing through iTunes program? Very curious about it.

I think iTunes just broke my optical drive. I was using it to burn a CD, when all of a sudden it just stopped, gave the doodly-beep "all done" sound, and now Shit Is Fucked Up- I can open the disc in windows explorer (where I see it only burned the first track), but iTunes won't recognize that there's a disc in the drive at all, and I can't eject it, either with the actual button or through iTunes or explorer.

― More Butty In Your Pants (Telephone thing), lundi 3 août 2009 05:52 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I had exactly the same situation last week. Eventually, I managed to eject the CD during booting.

I had to disconnect and reconnect my drive, which now seems to be working just fine.

Not only did they weirdly give everything in iTunes 9 a paler look (like changing the cover grid view background color to white, and the sidebar color a lighter shade of blue) but Cover Flow and other text has been changed to Helvetica? Huh?

On my Mac, it now looks more like the PC version did last I saw it. Not sure if you're talking about the PC version.

Yeah, I'm referring to the Mac version.

The fade on the top bar makes it looks kinda cheap. As does the volume bar being colored in. The new playlist icons are snazzy, though.

iPhone is Helvetica, is probably why

shit looks like itunes 2

Are Coverflow and Grid views any less crash-prone?

There was a serious helvetica conflict in Leopard that has apparently been fixed in Snow Leopard and which I assume is related to the font shift in iTunes.

I never had crash problems with Coverflow and Grid, so I don't know... but damn Helvetica just looks way too "serious" for iTunes. Probably right about unifying the iTunes/iPhone look, which is stupid, because my monitor can look better and different than what's suitable for the iPod screen.

Yeah, kinda dumb. Apple's been Helvetifying iPhoto and a few other apps for a while now, too.

You're all fontgeeking while I'm adding artist syncs to my iPhone instead of just playlists. DWEEBS.

i have my entire library on random right now and itunes is HEAVILY favoring xmas songs, it's eeeeeeeerie

Revive!

I guess this is more of an mp3 question and not just iTunes, but...

This is driving me nuts. Some of my mp3s are loud. Some of my mp3s are soft. Is there any way to keep from having to adjust the volume after every single goddamn song starts? LEVEL THIS SHIT!!

replaygain

preferences -> playback -> click 'sound check' works too

I'm not sure what I did, but somehow I double-clicked on something or other and now I have a master 'Artist' list showing up on my iTunes and I have no idea how to get rid of it. I'm talking about the 'Artist' column on the left of the screenshot here. Any ideas on how to make this go away? The usual right click to sort column options isn't applicable to this one for some reason.

http://i999.photobucket.com/albums/af118/jon830/Screenshot2010-04-02at23101PM.png

Command+B

See also View > Column Browser

Ah, thanks! I figured it would be something easy like that.

has anyone else noticed iTunes selling a bunch of popular indie records at $7.99? presumably to compete with Amazon mp3 . . .

Has anyone else noticed iTunes crashing my computer every time it tries to perform more than one operation at a time? Presumably to make me buy a new computer...

Nah that's just iTunes for ya. It's always kind of like that. I mean, it doesn't even have the ability to let you look at other playlists while a track in another playlist is paused...

why has itunes started randomly deleting my music? a load of carl craig the other day and now all of yearbook1? what a fucking hassle, how do i stop this ffs?

Are they getting the exclamation point or are they just vanishing altogether?

exclamation point and when i look for them in my folders they're nowhere to be found, just a few things but who knows really

My iTunes is messed up. No way have I listened to the aeroplane remix of baby can't stop 337 times. Which is a shame cuz I like to keep accurate track of these things.

my older version of itunes works okay, but these types of problems are precisely why i won't upgrade to the new version of itunes. leave well enough alone.

After restoring from a backup, it looks like I'm missing about 1/4 of the tracks from the Mute Audio Documents box, completely at random. I am not looking forward to reripping that thing.

Really really really wish people would stop tagging retail versions of albums with "(Album Version)" on every damned song. In the past week I've had to go back re-edit every track on the Against Me! and Janelle Monae albums.

Downloads from Amazon are particularly bad with that, for whatever reason.

Yeah, I hate that too. Haven't seen any other retailers besides Amazon that do it.

I might as well get a fucking discman considering the completely batshit ways people tag rap albums.

That shit where every artist is different because they list it by every guest on the track? Why did that start?

^drives me insane. put features in the title field ffs.

why has itunes started randomly deleting my music? a load of carl craig the other day and now all of yearbook1? what a fucking hassle, how do i stop this ffs?

Happens to me lots. You probably moved the folder iTunes accesses your mp3 files from in actual Windows Explorer.

Organize your music in Windows Explorer and then just select File > Add Folder To Library to get it back on your comp. Obviously use the Windows search function to just find where you put your music in the first place.

Anything you rip from a CD is automatically put in an appropriate iTunes folder, but as far as downloads go though they tend to get mixed up in your comp.

Go to dougsscripts.com and start finding/using applescripts to manage your iTunes / metadata. Super simple to install and use and it will save you lots of time and frustration.

With the rap album stuff, people seem to be unaware of or using the "Album Artist" tag improperly.

Discovered a good new way to make a smart playlist -- last skipped = at least 6 months ago + last played = at least 6 months ago. then shuffle. You get all the stuff you haven't heard in a while while filtering out a lot of stuff you just explicitly don't like or feel like listening to.

interesting idea, i will try it

I know it's due to copyright claims, but it seems like the shelf life of iTunes lyrics importers is about a year; took a while to find one that would work well on Macs this year, but Fabio's iTunes Lyrics Downloader has been working really well for me. Might have to switch language from Italian to English once you open it, but then all you have to do is highlight songs -> click "Download Lyrics," and presto. Not sure if it's pulling from more/better lyrics databases than previous importers, but it's doing a good job finding something for most songs.

Song clips are now a minute and a half instead of thirty seconds.

(For songs over three minutes, anyway.)

Its kinda hit or miss though, but I'm happy about it. Interesting side note though, if you have last.fm it plays long enough that it actually registers on your profile as a played track.

arcane silly question, but -- does anyone know of a script that can render all of your iTunes data (name, artist, genre, etc.) as lowercase? i just like the way it looks...

Check Dougs Apple Scripts if you are on a mac.

has a recent version of itunes on mac broken autocomplete with tag editing? it still works if you pull up the info window, but if you edit by clicking to rename in the main itunes interface there is no autocomplete. is that just me?

also, whichever version of itunes removed the cmd-r shortcut to reveal in finder: you suck.

oh right now it's cmd-shift-r because why not?

I didn't even know that shortcut existed to begin with - cool

for the technically challenged like me: is there a way, on a mac, to make the iTunes ctrl+L command (show track playing) work permanently - ie. even when iTunes is in the background?

I use Growl notifications but there are other 3rd party apps for that purpose.

hmm re Growl - you mean you have the notifications set to always remain on screen?

i thought that you were meant to be able to redownload stuff you'd already purchased from itunes without being charged again?

it lets me do it with some songs but not others :(

Is it possible you bought the others under a different Apple ID?

Mastered for iTunes

haven't heard any of it yet, kinda interested

well iTunes 11 is out and it's pretty much the slowest application of all time

I have 906GB in my iTunes library and I never get a pinwheel. Switching views is fast, editing metadata is painless. The never version is working great for me. How much RAM do you have?

I've heard conflicting reports, but if slowness is a ram issue I'm not that worried. I'll upgrade sooner or later.

6 GB ram, 300 GB library. I don't get the pinwheel, just click any view and it takes a good 5-6 seconds to switch over.

i don't have nearly that big a library, but it feels like the new one is a bit faster than 10, tbh

It's running considerably faster for me. Used to be super buggy but I haven't had any issues. I am a little peeved at how some view options were unnecessarily cut but oh well.

Interesting. I've just clicked around and everything loads fine except for Artists. I do pinwheel there every time I select it but Songs, Playlists, Albums etc all load quickly. I use Song view almost exclusively though.

345GB Library and cranks right along. Big performance improvement over v10

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/11/itunes_11_it_s_time_for_apple_s_horrible_bloated_program_to_die.html

Maybe I need to do a reboot or restart the program. For me switching views seems to lock things up briefly. The search bar is also very slow, I type in "R" and it brings up a zillion things which seems to really drain CPU power. v10 was pretty slow for me too but not to this level.

that said looking around in it this morning there do appear to be some neat new features and they seemed to have gotten rid of some of the real useless stuff (like iTunes DJ, what the hell was that)

They've made it more clunky to drag music from Windows explorer to ipod = me even more annoyed Amazon lost my order for an SD card so I never have to use this piece of shit application again

I actually used iTunes DJ! Though to be honest, I'm not sure how it was better than just doing a random shuffle on your Song list.. but it WAS better... somehow.

I played around with that "give me 5 recently played songs and 20 others" or whatever and it never seemed to work at all. It really did just seem like random shuffle though maybe it interacted with something I didn't have ?

What view options did they cut?

So which is it- is 11 faster or slower than 10? That's the deciding factor for me. 10 is painfully slow on my Mac mini.

from a quick glance between this and the other apple thread, i think it's faster for most

iTunes dj was great

yeah I guess I'm the only one saying it's slower

I never update to a new itunes until it's been out at least half a year.

They've made it more clunky to drag music from Windows explorer to ipod

Won't be downloading that then. Am I just getting old, or is software in a decline-of-the-Roman-empire phase where there's a 50% chance that any one app update will be worse than what came before? Although I listen to most of my music on Winamp, so it's probably the first one.

I don't think anything recent has been as bad as the update that introduced gapless playback and havoc it wreaked upon hapless ipods (updating gapless playback information...updating gapless playback information...updating gapless playback information...updating gapless playback information...updating gapless playback information...updating gapless playback information...)

I downloaded it. Definitely seems faster for me. No major downsides, although I'm not so into the look of it.

By the way, anyone out there using BitPerfect or other higher-audio-quality players/plugins/whatever? I've tested a bunch out and am loving BitPerfect. Cheapest of the bunch, easy, great sound.

Uh why aren't all the artists showing up in my artist list on my iPhone any more? I hate iTunes so much

p amazed at how ugly it is for an apple product actually, looks like a homebrew shonky "itunes" skin you'd get for mediamonkey or whatever

faster for me although i dont really ever use it so

also no artwork in the bottom corner SUXXX, why are people gonna bother making it for singles at all now

I hate it. I used to type in the artist and all the songs would appear quickly. Now all the separate albums show up with the artwork, none of which is important to me. Editing and browsing takes forever.

You can change your view back to the way it was. Not in front of it now but it's possible with menu selections.

I've changed most of it back, but I haven't yet figured out how to get that big album artwork option again instead of the teeny, tiny icon in the status window.

189.73 gigs, 2GB RAM, slow as hell but less horrible than iTunes 10 was. I already used a grid view instead of a list (even though that was a major factor in the slowdown), so I'm not too torn up about it being the default now, but I really hate how quickly typing an artist name to skip to them will auto-open the first result.

Very clunky interface now. Annoying to use. And it sounds like they've given the eq a weird boost around in the lower midrange/upper bass. More "body." Sounds fuller, but also sometimes more sluggish, than before.

How do I get the cover flow back?

yeah right now the program itself isn't so bad but the search is still kinda dumb...say I wanted to hear anything Scott Walker/Walker Brothers and I type in "walker", I don't get the list of anything, just a bunch of suggestions that take it into views I don't want. also I type in "w" and everything just freezes. but ymmv

Also making the miniplayer only accessible from a dropdown menu where it then gives you 2 players is dumb.

no volume control on miniplayer either. alot of weird choices.

yeah right now the program itself isn't so bad but the search is still kinda dumb...say I wanted to hear anything Scott Walker/Walker Brothers and I type in "walker", I don't get the list of anything, just a bunch of suggestions that take it into views I don't want. also I type in "w" and everything just freezes. but ymmv

OTM. This is my main gripe. And yes, it's a lot slower for me.

yeah right now the program itself isn't so bad but the search is still kinda dumb...say I wanted to hear anything Scott Walker/Walker Brothers and I type in "walker", I don't get the list of anything, just a bunch of suggestions that take it into views I don't want.

That SUCKS.

well I can deal with that but when you type in "walker" you get to look at the artists/songs/albums for "w", wait five seconds, then "wa", wait five seconds then "wal"...that's the part that's annoying

switch the search back to the old way by changing the parameter from "Search entire library" to "all". works just fine.

That's it! Thank you, thank you, EZ.

That did it. Thanks!!

What is the consensus in tagging multi-disc albums these days? It used be preferred to note it in the album name (i.e. The Beatles (disc one)) but has that switched to using the ID3 tags instead?

there was consensus?

If it's a 2cd album like The Beatles or 666 I never name the discs separately. ID3 indeed.

yeah just use the Disc # fields

What about boxed sets?

If a box set is particularly well-sequenced (like the 2CD Ryko Soft Boys comp or the Richard Thompson Watching The Dark) where each disc is a nice listen, then I do file them as separate discs.

I always break things out by disc number in the ID3 tags regardless

I'm with DJP on this one.

Not being able to open playlists in separate windows is a pain.

Has anyone tried iTunes Match? I'm guessing it's to be avoided judging from most online commentary, just wondering if it's improved at all. Seems pretty cheap for what you get.

it's gotten a lot better since launch though there's still an itunes store error every once in a while

my only gripe with it is when you enable itunes match for your iphone, it's all or nothing: you can't manually drag songs to your iphone, you'll have to download them from itunes match

agree about playlists in separate windows. used that a bunch and now it's gone.

So here's a stupid question. I usually don't sync my iPod, and just drag and drop albums to it directly. I can't find any way to do this in iTunes 11- am I overlooking something really obvious?

There is a ritual that will re-enable the left sidebar. First u must purify yourself.

x-post: drag your selection to the right, an extra column will miraculously appear with your iPod at the top

What is the consensus in tagging multi-disc albums these days? It used be preferred to note it in the album name (i.e. The Beatles (disc one)) but has that switched to using the ID3 tags instead?
I'm a real re-tagging geek. Not only do I get rid of all multi-disc tags, if it's a compilation I change it to the original album title and artwork, if there was one. I also change the year to the original release date if I can find it (this part's the most time-consuming). In addition, I delete all genre tags because they're pretty useless anyway.

so wait what, search doesnt work for external devices anymore? i can only search my library and not the connected ipod? what possible assclown reasoning can there be for removing that ffs?

No fix for the streaming-content problem in the Miniplayer in 11.0.1 -- still hoping.

Fuck it. Reverted back to 10.7.

A clunky interface, yes, but seeing songs I downloaded in 2003 in the iCloud or whatever is like meeting old friends who borrowed money and never paid me back even after saying hi at the bar.

itunes is like a Microsoft product. Or if yahoo! made a music player.

I was completely happy with it until I suddenly wasn't. First time I've ever uninstalled a piece of software and backed up a full version.

I dunno, works fine for me.

Everything's fine about it except for the miniplayer/streaming thing, but that's a dealbreaker, so there you go. If/when they fix that in 11, I'll reinstall it.

Fair nuff!

Weird, the ratings for 109 songs in my library got wiped out. I hate computers.

Oh, ratings are so fun and they take so much time!!

I'm a control freak about those playlists. When I'm going for a car ride, I need my four and five star tracks. I like taking people for a ride and they go, "this is good driving music" I don't think people riding in my car should be forced to listen to any old crap.

It's embarrassing and hilarious at the same time when you just leave the thing on in a carload of people and some really dated shit from the nineties comes BLARING at you!

Those "music match" programs mostly still suck. I used last.fm a bit to find out which bands sound like other bands, I got better mixes that way.

Also, you're right about itunes looking more and more like a Microsoft product. I thought they would have gotten a face lift by now...prettified. Still great for playlists and fun anal stats stuff like "last played" or "date added".

I'm wondering if there's a way, on the new version of iTunes, to bring back the thing at the bottom that tells you how many hours or days of music/podcasts are in your library? Seems a weird thing to do away with.

If you view it in songs it still tells you.

yeah if you re-enable the sidebar, view in songs mode, and switch the search function, it's basically a better version of v10

President Keyes, you can choose View/Status Bar (i think) and it will bring that bottom bar back.

thanks

Just watched a very funny South Park about the iTunes agreement. Sends up Apple rather grotesquely, which is cool.

JSUS how do I remove missing tracks on this thing? this is insane...

Is there any way of bringing back how many minutes or hours are in a specific selection of tracks? ie not an entire library or playlist.

highlight them and it's listed at the bottom in usual space

click menu button in top left corner and choose 'show menu bar'. go to the View menu and choose 'show status bar'

yess! ta

guh, itunes 11, wtf : /

times a million -

beef with itunes:

itunes suddenly has no internet connection (help, checking for updates, store, etc), and also isn't recognizing my iphone. both problems started happening at the same time. wtf is going on

itunes 11.2.2.3
iphone 5, 7.1.2

I used to use Privatunes to scrub my iTunes store-purchased files of info, but it doesn't seem to work anymore. Anyone know of a utility that will do this?

finally, finally i can view a playlist as a list of albums

(view a playlist, select Albums in the top right, you'll see a bunch of album covers instead of a list of tracks)

hasn't that been in there since 10?

Well, no, because clearly I would have noticed it, QED

Yeah I think that's been a feature for awhile. You could do choose how any grouping of albums displayed, whether playlist or full library.

my old playlists look like this

http://i.imgur.com/JEWfPwJ.png

but when I make a new playlist, it looks like this

http://i.imgur.com/YiiyRFv.png

How do I turn this off?

At the top-right of the iTunes window (just under the search box), switch from "Playlist" to "Songs"

sick, thank you!!!!!

lol, I had to talk my daughter down from a conniption fit about that exact issue last night. It definitely isn't intuitive or particularly easy to find.

i ran into this issue too. it's so stupid. don't like what they've done on the phone side either.

I accidentally made the iTunes window full screen and it took essentially total keyboard button mashing to get it back to normal. I still don't know what key to press. iTunes is amazing in the way it gets worse with every new version.

command + control + f will get you out of full-screen mode on any app. Intuitive, right? Everyone got it?

I eventually had to brute-force that stupid key combo into my head because I kept invoking full-screen. Does anyone use full-screen?

iTunes UI is the worst case of "it was working so we fixed it" software development ever. At least it still supports AppleScript.

I actually thought iTunes 10 was pretty good. Album flip view or whatever was great. Everything after has been abysmal.

Cover Flow was great, then Apple decided it was a terrible idea for some reason?

They can keep adding things but I really don't think I wanna use any function that wasn't there in 2005.

I wish that Apple initially split out books, podcast, videos, and everything that isn't music into their own separate apps instead of shoehorning the whole works into iTunes and then trying to undo it all. (think this would have been around iTunes 8 or 9?)

At least they did that with Books, so far. problem is they will still want the iTunes store to sell everything, so all the capability needs to be to be in the same client, naturally..

I have a feeling there's a lot of accounting plumbing upstream that naturally just takes forever to change. I just noticed that my iTunes purchase receipts now say Apple, Inc instead of iTunes.

iTunes ?

OK, now where did this go?

Found it... It's in "View" now!

Still the worst computer application that has ever been written.

Roffle I loved iTunes (I love a lot of shitty things, go figure).

I wanted as long as possible to make the switch from iTunes to the newish Mac Music app cause I knew there would be issues. WOW are there issues, so so many issues. I’ll skim past the part where Apple told me the same lie in three different tech support sessions, moving past how there’s a bug that randomly causes major issues on all sound output — not just the usual annoying clicking and popping noises, the bug causes my entire sound output to slow down. So fucked up haha.

Anyway now I’ve spent oh three months rebuilding my music library that Apple destroyed and I keep finding new weird quirks. If ANYONE else still uses this crap does this make sense?

Sometimes when I’m listening to a song in the song list of Music, and I try to “go to current song” [command-L] it will only show me the album view. There’s no way to jump to the current song in the list, it will only show me shitty album view, like it’s forcing it on me. Is there any rhyme or reason to this??

*WAITED as long as possible, not “wanted”

Alternatively I’m open to suggestions for replacements for Music on Mac. (I’ve also been exploring Ubuntu some too.)

The changeover from iTunes to iTunes Match to Apple Music was . . . less than perfect. I've encountered numerous instances of lost tracks and missing cover art. And the way Apple Music handles smart playlists on mobile devices is unpredictable.

I'm still limping by with iTunes on my MacBook Pro, terrified to make the switch. Ostensibly my library is on an external hard drive and I'm told it's "pretty easy" to switch with this type of external drive library but... I have my doubts.

Your doubts are very valid. The specific issue that I feel like killed my library (of fifteen years ha) is with syncing my iPhone. I use USB to sync — don’t trust this “cloud” jibberjabber — and now when I sync it copies the entire music library selected for my phone over again. I usually keep thousands of songs on there and like to sync frequently so I regard that as a dealbreaker.

I’ve been able to rebuild the library from scratch and recover a lot of the data from my old library by exporting playlists. Still l very tedious, but I actually want all my data, that’s why I stuck with these senescent apps.

I am pretty expert at transferring music libraries and glad to offer advice if needed when you decide to make the fatal leap.

But Jimbeaux I don’t really have any issues with smart playlists.

Ha, I'm even more old fashioned in that I don't sync at all with my iPhone, especially since my library is larger than the space on my phone, I just manually add and remove songs from the iPhone via USB.

Yeah I think we’re basically the same unless by “manual” you mean one-by-one?

My library wouldn’t fit on my phone either, I sync selected playlists. I have a main phone playlist and also use the “grouping” field like hashtags so I have smart playlists like ‘Lounge’ etc.

But Jimbeaux I don’t really have any issues with smart playlists.

I see it mostly in classical playlists--I have one, for example, that is based on not having listened to an album in more than a year. The tracks often show up completely out of order, and a lot of times a particular track won't show up in the list, even though I haven't listened to that one any more recently than I have to the rest of the album.

xp - not one by one, but I'll just grab either a playlist or a bunch of albums to drag onto it

Like an old-school iPod.

xp

As for the smart playlists I don’t mess with the classical-specific fields and don’t doubt they could cause issues.

You know what really grinds my gears - that manual USB syncing doesn't really work anymore if you're on Apple Music. You still have to go to the phone make sure those files are downloaded in the app.

It’s working for me now since I rebuilt my library.

But FFS Apple:

"Podcasts are stored in a cache folder in ~/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts . This is not designed to be user accessible, and the podcast files do not display the original file names. You can, however, drag podcast files from the Podcasts app to the Desktop or to a folder."

Do these files actually exist? Who knows.

It’s a little weird that I’m so attached to my music that I had some little dissociative moments when I was feeling a little ‘tired and emotional’ and wasn’t sure whether my system was glitching or I was.

Well I broke it again. That’s at least 20 hours of work wasted since my last backup. Always Be baCking up! Wow this is frustrating.

My experience is that Music is just iTunes with podcasts and video stripped out, everything looks and works the same: tagging, playlists, syncing, scripting. Unfortunately, same limitations too (no multiple artists, multiple genres, etc).

I hate how the view changes on its own. I have to manually set the filter field to search my songs, and then it disappears and I have to bring it up again.

xp

Yes all my scripts etc from iTunes seem to work the same. It’s just that my library somehow got corrupted in the migration. (I have been told that skipping major upgrades can cause issues so that may be part of it.)

If you’re on Mac or Linux do you like any non-cloud alternatives?

I'm on Mac - I've got Plex/Plexamp/Prism and Navidrome/Substreamer as additional servers/clients for streaming/syncing outside the house but neither are fully equivalent. Swinsian is OK for local playback but no sync-to-iPhone/iPad so I don't really see why I should switch.

It's all very frustrating since you can see what Apple Music *could* be with only a little bit of effort from the Apple devs: some additional support for tags like release type (album/single/live/etc), language, multiple artists/genres. Support for streaming/sync outside the local network (iCloud Relay looks ideal for that). Allow building smart playlists on the mobile app. Not really rocket science, but it's clear there's been zero investment in local music.

Smart playlists don’t even update on the mobile app (they used to.)

I kept my old iPod and upgraded both the battery and the hard drive. (The hard drive is basically an SD adapter with two SD card slots. The SD cards I use are pretty standard and inexpensive - put together they can hold over 500 GB.)

My phone gets used for too many things - I don't always have the opportunity to recharge the battery, I don't have steady internet access if I'm taking a long subway ride, and it doesn't even have a headphone jack anymore (I don't like ear pods, my headphones and ear monitors are much better), so I generally keep my music on my iPod, not my phone.

I have an old Macbook that got upgraded to the last iteration of iTunes before Music, so it can only synch, not drag and drop, but that's fine - I basically have two complete copies of my iTunes library, one on an external drive and one on my iPod, and going along with syncing at least means I don't have to worry about backing shit up because it's built into the setup. I haven't moved to Music yet, but will probably have to eventually. The OS on the old Macbook is getting less and less functional as it supports less and less software.

Just caught that sorry. A few issues — I wouldn’t really count your iPod library as a backup sorry. There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to recover that if need be. I have my phone library, my MacBook library, and and a backup on a hard drive. (I don’t fw Time Machine.) That’s one point in iTunes favor — if you get your libraries straight it does handle switching between them fairly painlessly.

My phone gets used for too many things - I don't always have the opportunity to recharge the battery, I don't have steady internet access if I'm taking a long subway ride, and it doesn't even have a headphone jack anymore (I don't like ear pods, my headphones and ear monitors are much better), so I generally keep my music on my iPod, not my phone.

Assuming you aren’t philosophically opposed to having an iPhone it will serve your purposes. I often go to airplane mode on transit to save my battery but just playing music offline doesn’t eat up much charge generally. Not entirely clear on your headphone preferred there tho. Clearly iPhone phased out headphone jacks which turned into a positive for me cause I terminated wired headphones very regularly. Bluetooth earbuds work for me, these Belkins seem nigh indestructible.

Actually just realized you said the iPod library is stored on SD cards (very clever). So that does serve as a dependable backup, my bad.

It just gets worse and worse from my POV. I had to replace my old phone and didn’t realize the new one had home sharing enabled which caused most of my library on the phone to appear as “not available in your country or region”. That was a nice scare.

They’re trying to rid of ratings in favor of ‘loves’, ratings aren’t marketable enough. Every update is in the direction of making it more crappy. Can I just have iTunes back?

Re the lack of headphone socket, there is also an inch long, inexpensive and very high quality 3.5mm-lightning adapter you can leave clipped on your headphone jack. It seems like a fudge for a couple of days and then you forget it because it works well. At least the phone is waterproof as a result of the deletion.

Waterproof until you have to get a third party screen/charging jack replacement. Hence my need to replace my old phone (it did have quite a sordid history of screen replacements).

I’m now able to isolate the failures in my rebuilt library to specific songs. However the app is actively refusing to let me delete these problem songs at this point. I delete, I log out and log back in to clear RAM or whatever (I’m no Turing okay). The songs are still there! If this is AI, I’m impressed with how pigheaded it is.

(Actually harkens back to one of my dad’s best German phrases: die Tücke des Objekts — the spite of objects.)

Yeah I have some Autechre tracks that keep resetting the artist name, regardless of how many times I change it to the correct title. There must be hidden caches or something.

Could have to do with permissions? Really wish they hadn’t taken that “repair permissions” option from disk utility long ago. Supposedly it’s an automatic process now but I have doubts.

Anyway with regards to the specific gripe I had, restarting my computer sorted it. For now.

I will wrap up my interminable griping, I had thought that at some point soon I'd be able say "well I've been working on for FIVE MONTHS but I finally finished rebuilding my library!" But no, it's just an endless pit of wasted effort and time.

A couple of technical notes I meant to mention though:

- The Doug's Scripts page is a good source for the Artist-Name Corrector and other scripts etc which are currently being updated for the Music app: https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php
- If anyone else catches The Bug in Apple sound output that's going around, this is the key phrase to clear it (until it reappears):

sudo killall coreaudiod

(Via Terminal of course.)