iTunes ?

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'

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.)