Hatred of Itunes

Yep, saw that - I'm a little scared of the transcoding it seems to demand

if you choose original quality it doesn't transcode

I've used it remotely for other stuff but I was even lazy and just streamed off my home server straight to my phone last week.

From looking around it seems that Plex has a good foundation to stick around for a while; this winter i'll see about creating a real NAS server to run it. Thanks for the recommendation! Right now I'm just loading my iTunes library over a network, there's not a server per se

there are much cheaper options but I've got this sucker for my movies and am slowly offloading music on it. it'll run an iTunes-style server, too: https://www.wdc.com/products/network-attached-storage/my-cloud-pr2100.html

I was about to pull the trigger on the Synology DS218+, which is essentially the same thing. QNAP also makes decent ones

What's the file system on that my cloud thing?

Oh just in case anyone runs across this thread later, looks like Synology can use Backblaze, I figured I was going to be SOL on offsite backup, nice surprise

xp you know, it lets you log in via ssh and actually run docker containers (all of the "apps" are a thin gui over containerized stuff) but I've never actually checked? it does RAID based on options you select and my general non-work ethos is to not give a shit

it might just be ext2, I'd have to connect at home and check

yeah, the WD NAS options allow off-site backup stuff too

I've used the built-in integrations (the GUI and plugins) to connect Dropbox and a few other things

Brakhage, search for the album you’re having a problem with and edit info. The last id tag will let you modify how you sort that album. Play around with that for a while

*carefully play around with that. I have an album with 120 different artists/tracks. I was able to keep each individual artist tag and have the artist (album artist?) sorted as ‘various’ so that I didn’t have 120 artists popping up on my phone when I selected the artist tab in the music app.

Sometimes I have albums show up twice or more when there is little differences in the metadata as well. Like if the band is spelled Doopees vs DOOPEES. Basically whenever the album’s sort IDs don’t match slightly.

mh - I'm just wondering how it could have read / write compatibility with macs and windows stuff as advertised and not be FAT and limited to 4 GB per file

or maybe you have to choose your OS when you set up the box. that's probably it.

xp I hear you on the sorting stuff Flopsy, have been bitten by that before, but I shouldn't have to retag 2TB of files cos iOS suddenly can't read a field correctly. It's worth experimenting with to see if changing that on one LP makes a difference though, good shout

I found something yesterday that makes me think this problem is more fundamental - all of the books I have loaded manually (12.7 moved this to a menu called 'File Sharing' when the phone is connected) in my Kindle app are gone, but only on the phone; again, viewed through iTunes, everything is there. So this seems to be a problem that affects any manually copied file

Maybe this has something to do with the introduction of the Files viewer? Though I had none of these problems running iOS11 on an iphone 6.

calstars, it's a network share. You can attach other drives directly to copy *to* it, but it's a network file server. So the only way you get files to and from it normally is via SMB, NFS, or even AFP. It doesn't matter what it uses internally because it's never mounted as a hard drive.

fwiw you can turn any of those options on or off at any time, although SMB is the preferred protocol on both macos and windows now, iirc

I have no idea if this question has been dealt with here before or not. I have some of the music on my Mac synced over to my phone using playlists. A few weeks ago I realized a lot of ID3 tags were just incorrect -- like, one song on an album would be by Various Artists instead of the actual artist. I fixed those tags in itunes on my Mac, but the corrections won't sync over to the phone. Searching reveals that this has been a major thing for a long time, but I couldn't find any fixes. Has anyone else had this problem?

Yes, this is an error since iOS 11, the syncing of the tags is messed up. Everybody's waiting for a fix. Temporary solution: use another music player app, one that doesn't use the iOS Music database, such as Pyro.

Both Ecoute and Serato Pyro have the same problems reading tags properly, unfortunately ... it's at the OS level, not the app level, from my testing. Hoping the solution when it arrives won't force a wipe and restore

er, require, not force

In other news aside from the migration being hellish due to the formatting on the disks holding the original files being somewhat bad and the NAS OS being unable to deal, the Synology is fantastic; should have made this move years ago

Are you sure? Pyro fixes all metadata problems I have, it seems to rescan every file itself (for BPM detection) and in the process picks up the correct tags.

Could apple make it any fucking harder to take a playlist from itunes and keep the order on the ipod itself

guessing just easier to make the order on the ipod instead t's been awhile since i've done this)

xp for me Pyro handles the files identically; the LPs that managed to survive iOS11 are intact, just as they are in the Music app, and the vast majority are sharded across a million unknown album titles

If you think it's got to build its own index over a while I can pop it back on the phone and let it sit idle for a while to figure things out, though. Will give it a shot

I let Pyro churn for a while but I got a little freaked out by the heat all that disk activity was generating and stopped that. But ...

I managed to sort out the unknown-albums issue on the phone. Here's what I did:

Originally I was autofilling the phone from a giant playlist. I switched it to *syncing* that same playlist, not autofilling from it. (Which is confusing because the autofill option appears to have gone away now; I can't find it.) When I switched that preference, iTunes told me it was going to wipe the music from the phone, which I said okay to, then it began syncing the playlist. When it completed, the phone began reading all the tags correctly.

Also, I'd force-quit the Music app while all this was happening, just in case it became confused

my last post to this thread was a great success so here's hoping yall can fix this one

songs don't play on iTunes (on my laptop). press play, and it just sits at 0:00 and doesn't budge

haven't changed anything

Just throw your computer into a quarry

you forgot lukey's galaxy-brain step where you draw a computer onto a cardboard box and put a radio inside the box and turn it on

Check where it's trying to play to, e.g. Apple TV / Airplay - icon to the right of volume slider

iTunes 12.7.4 decided to scramble my library; metadata is combined between LPs, as an example Zappa is now the album artist for a Stockhausen record. If you try to play one track, it'll begin playing a totally different album. Some LPs have completely vanished, renamed to something I can't find or deleted altogether.

It's not as simple as a corrupted xml file, because iTunes has been busy behind the scenes randomizing the actual files - albums are fragmented across three or four directories with varying names, some album titles are now artists and promoted to the top level of the directory. Apple Music's always been disabled, btw.

I can't even think about the enormity of the task to sort this out, this is a 2TB library that took many years to create.

Looking at it a little more closely there's a weird kind of dementia at work - some LPs have been fragmented historically, so that they're in four or five states corresponding to what they were at different stages of being acquired. So for instance four tracks might think they're on a disk that hasn't been mounted in a year, and four other tracks might have some of the same metadata that existed when the tracks were originally copied. It's as if instead of having a record of the files' states as of now, and using that, it's now using a combination of all the historical states of the files and randomly allocating them. I'm not even sure how that's possible.

that's really strange. I think I'm on the same version but thus far I haven't had any issues like that. Will confirm that iTunes does some very strange things with the library, particularly the way it spreads it out on the iPod. I had to import an old library once my HD got corrupted and a lot of very strange things happened. Good luck!!

Still running 10.6 OSX and iTunes cannot upgrade beyond 11.4 version so I’m having trouble accessing the cloud to re import earlier purchases. Any ideas??

soooo glad I never even got on this hamster wheel

Will confirm that iTunes does some very strange things with the library, particularly the way it spreads it out on the iPod

As far as I know, music on iOS has always had a special fragmentation applied to it - each file is broken up and fragments renamed as something not-human-readable. The idea behind this was to make it very difficult to extract files from a phone by mandating that the only way to read music would be to reference a registry file (which of course can be corrupted). When iOS rolled out, the working assumption was that everyone would be trading 8GB of music files at a time with each other in a piracy bonanza if steps like that weren't taken. I believe this is why there are two kinds of music apps for iOS; ones that have reverse engineered that fragmented file structure and therefore require that iTunes exists, and ones that just read files off the disk, requiring that 'disk use' be turned on for that device. (Not an iOS dev, just have been working with these things for a long time. The state of play might be different now)

yea I think you're right. I remember when the iPod came out the RIAA made a big deal about people potentially just dumping an iPod's worth of files onto someone else's library. I wonder if this was done as a concession to them or if they were worried about iTunes sales.

The weird directory structure and file naming on iPod/iPhone is more due to how they implemented indexing and is probably more of a legacy thing at this point. If you copy all the music files off, you can easily open them in a program that dumps them back in the right file name/location schema. I've done that recently to grab stuff off an old iPod.

If the file metadata itself is getting messed up then iTunes has fucked up in a severe way

I'm trying to get the Remote app on my iPhone to recognize the iTunes library on my PC- the ideal end result being me, sitting on my couch, queuing up music on my PC which then plays back through the stereo speakers it's wired up to around a corner- and it just doesn't goddamn work. The app directs me to click a "Remote button in the upper left hand corner of the iTunes app" (this is a complete fiction, no such button is in evidence) to enter a numeric code, and when I try to configure Home Sharing on the PC end I just see an error message asking that I re-enable the Bonjour service. There is no Bonjour service installed or running on my (fairly new) PC, and the only download link I can find on Apple's site is a version of Bonjour for print services from 2010. Apple's phone support failed to understand the question multiple times, never even looked into the Bonjour issue, and recommended 1) I delete and reinstall the app (which would somehow magically fix the Home Sharing issue on an unconnected PC) 2) giving up because "I guess it only works with Macs" (then why didn't you know that twenty minutes ago and why does the Remote's app page and the Home Sharing support article on Apple.com mention "Mac or PC" multiple times)

hhhhhnnnnnrrrrrgh

c ya

R.I.P. iTunes: Apple will kill the clunky, but world-shattering, icon next week https://t.co/fr20zCJApL pic.twitter.com/ckOuPboI5b

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) May 31, 2019

Ehh
So does this I have to open three different apps on my Mac when I want to sync my music, podcasts, and movies / tv?

i mean, if you have a library of files you are still gonna have to have a big list of text, aren't you?

maybe it could just be a big square of album art and you just swipe swipe swipe that square, forever, to get at what you want.

swiping fruitlessly at my ipod, like a cat watching a fish on tv

I still use iTunes to organize my music files

https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_app-cover-l,f_auto/p/a268dc3c-9b62-11e6-a0e6-00163ed833e7/405525892/coverflow-screenshot.jpg

that was nominally functional on the first computer i could use it on, i should give it a whirl on my current one and see if its massive processing power opens up a whole flowing new world