Help - taking Unitiserve ripped CD collection on the road

LQ mirror and MP3 import to Itunes was painless, and MQ mirror and coding to alac with tags wasn't too bad, but the subsequent repairing of MQ song info in itunes is a pain. iTunes won't put songs in the same or correct albums if the song album metadata isn't identical. Opening the info for all songs on the album then saving works ( no need to re insert the cd) but I think there must be a better way.

The beauty of a Vortexbox powered server is that it can easily mirror your entire collection to either alac or mp3 with no fuss at all and no tagging issues. Incidentally it will do the same with video - mkv mirrored to mp4 - brilliant.

The way that the uServe insists it knows how best to organise your music files is one of the reasons why I cancelled my order two years ago and bought a Nap 200 instead. 

Tog

I had very little trouble moving the uServe's mp3 rips into iTunes.  Indeed, I replaced my entire cobbled-together iTunes library that I'd been amassing for what -- 10 years now? -- with uServe 320kbps mp3 rips. A couple of albums were not recognized right off, but that was about it.  The basic metadata was all there, as was the album art.  And to the extent album art did not come over, iTunes seems particularly adept at finding that on its own.

But it was not AS seamless as some solutions that specifically enable the creation of an intact iTunes library.  And indeed, I had to import each cd into iTunes. 

I found a good solution:

1. Download and install Doug's Applescripts for iTunes #216 (or create your own applescript to do the same thing)

2. Create copy of MQ and import entire MQ copy to iTunes

3. Open iTunes in song view and select all songs in the MQ

4. Run script. All Artist folder names are mirrored to iTunes artist tag and all album folder names are mirrored to iTunes album tag

5. Switch to album view in iTunes, select all albums and "Get Artwork"

The result is a fully tagged iTunes version of MQ including artwork. No need to convert from WAV, look up in external databases etc. I tried on a few artists so far and this process is nearly instantaneous. I will confirm when the whole MQ is tagged.

Update - it took about 8 hours to tag my entire MQ folder of 40k songs, and about half an hour to add the artwork - iTunes found about 75% of the album artwork. Now I can convert the tagged songs to any other format supported by iTunes, or continue to use the WAV files as originally ripped by the Unitiserve.

Since you've thrown it open to everybody ..... from where I sit, I believe Jeremy is facing one dogged weekend of fateful decision making. And I do not envy him. Although, his cat seems willing to capitulate.

AllenB,

Well I wouldn't call pushing two buttons (select all, run script) a lot of work - it was all done by my MBP while I slept

But I agree  it is all a bit improvised after the fact. Hopefully somebody including me will get around to paypal Doug some money.

Anyway - this is what my son calls a "first world problem". I am very happy if I have a simple way to play a whole album in the same way QuickTime plays a song. Converting to another format is not  necessary although of course I am curious to see if ALAC sounds different from the WAV.

ALAC, no, but AAC is licensed separately for encoding vs. decoding.

Quick update - converting everything from WAV to ALAC took several days, can't do a proper comparison now as I am traveling but even with headphones/portable speakers WAV clearly sounds better to me than ALAC, both played with iTunes.