ALL music copied to HD organised into al***s/artists by Media Player, but....

Posted by: Consciousmess on 09 January 2011

....I now specified iTunes to look in this folder and add to its library.

The intention was to have all my material accessed and organised in ARTISTS and ALBUMS, so I could transmit things wirelessly to my forthcoming Mac Airstation, and then convert to analogue with the nDAC, 282, 250.2.......

....with the opportunity left open to get a 555PS for the nDAC when funds allow.

That was the idea, but now all my tracks are scattered together by iTunes. I suspect iTunes is the only way to access my tracks, not Windows Media Player.

Can anybody offer any advice? I'd be so grateful if there was something I could do as this is my whole music collection (approx 600+ CDs).

Many thanks!!

Jon
Posted on: 09 January 2011 by Geoff P
I am not an I-tunes user except to put a few albums on my i-pod.

What I-tunes did to you it did to me. The only way to get albums and artists under control that I found was to create a folder on the HD to point i-tunes at then copy one album complete with embedded tags at a time so it entered i-tunes the way I wanted.

You can ignore i-tunes if you like and start again with Windows Media Player. WMP is quite happy to run on a PC that has I-tunes. Just delete all the albums etc from the WMP display library and start it again with a nothing in it ( it will NOT delete your music only the WMP links used for serving music.)I find that easier to handle as WMP will scan through your music and sort by album/ artist/ folder etc which ever you choose, if you point it at the folder your music is in and nothing else.

WMP is just as capable as I-Tunes at 'serving' music from a PC to a media player.

regards
Geoff
Posted on: 09 January 2011 by garyi
You need to be a lot more specific about 'scattered together'

I rather suspect you ripped your media as WAV, in which case its no use blaming itunes, WAV is pretty shit all in all, it cannot be tagged, so any programme using them has to create a little file for the tunes in question, these rarely travel well.

Lots of learning to do. The first being leave WAV alone, its a pain in the arse.

Next thing to check is if the programme you used originally can export the music in any meaningful way so that other programmes can make sense of it.

Just FYI this is the way it is. I expect if one was to take the rips from say and HDX and put them in itunes, or WMP or where ever they would encounter the same issue.
Posted on: 09 January 2011 by Aleg
Gary

WAV can be tagged perfectly as you will know by now.

It is just that shitty programs like iTunes can't handle them. However there are better programs that do.

WAV files also sound better through e.g. The nDAC than compressed formats.
Posted on: 09 January 2011 by garyi
OK, specifically WAVs are not very good for tagging, some programmes can sort of stick stuff in at the end.

Fact is WAV is not ideal for tagging and frequently people run into the same issue time after time between programmes, depending on how the programme dealt with the limited functionality of WAV, then suddenly everything is iTunes fault.

Long and short as stated JOn needs to return to his original programme and see what output options it has for how ever it has tagged the untaggable.
Posted on: 09 January 2011 by Tog
quote:
Originally posted by Aleg:
Gary

WAV can be tagged perfectly as you will know by now.

It is just that shitty programs like iTunes can't handle them. However there are better programs that do.

WAV files also sound better through e.g. The nDAC than compressed formats.


Nah itunes has better things to do ... like handling aiff which as you know is identical to wav - oh and its free with some exceptionally good computers.

Tog
Posted on: 09 January 2011 by Aleg
quote:
Originally posted by garyi:
OK, specifically WAVs are not very good for tagging, some programmes can sort of stick stuff in at the end.

Fact is WAV is not ideal for tagging and frequently people run into the same issue time after time between programmes, depending on how the programme dealt with the limited functionality of WAV, then suddenly everything is iTunes fault.

Long and short as stated JOn needs to return to his original programme and see what output options it has for how ever it has tagged the untaggable.


If the OP didn't do anything to get his rips tagged than iTunes will make a mess of it, regardless of the format used. If properly tagged iTunes will store the tracks in Artist / Album structured folders.

Regarding WAV tagging, there is no limitation. All ID tags that are being used for flac, mp3, ape or whatever format can be applied to WAV-files. Where it is stored is of no consequence because the WAV specifications allow for storing meta data in the file and that is where the tags are stored. It's just that not all programs implement the WAV specs properly (or wrongly assume no tags will be present) or will not read the meta data when it is actually present. You should try dBPoweramp, JRiver, mpd and see what is possible and enjoy better sound as well.
Posted on: 09 January 2011 by Guido Fawkes
iTunes stores my music on my 2TB music disc as Artist/Album/Track - I use Amiga Interchange File Format (AIFF).

I used a Tag editor before importing into iTunes to make sure the tags contained the artists name, album title and track title (found a package called Media Rage), but if anybody can recommend a better one then then I'll give it go. I used Max and XLD to get the music.

I'm using an old PowerMac G5 with the OS and programs on the boot disc and a separate 2TB Seagate drive for my iTunes library. I've got a back-up of the music on CD and a separate USB drive. I've also got an old 100 GB Firewire drive on which I clone the boot disk.

The Apple software has worked really well so far - it is a shame Apple doesn't offer any support for non-Intel users any longer.

My gies, Jon, is that iTunes couldn't figure out the Tags - especially if you used WAV, which isn't very good in this respect. It is a shame iTunes doesn't support FLAC as this would be a universal format across most music players.
Posted on: 09 January 2011 by Eloise
Again... AIFF is not Amiga Interchange File Format. It's Audio Interchange File Format.

Yes it was based on EA's IFF format which was used extensively by the Amiga (IFF was primarily a graphics format which also supported audio). It's adoption by Apple as their default audio format was presumably due to the shared use of Motorola processors.

Eloise