i-tunes fXXcks it up...Grrr

Posted by: Geoff P on 15 August 2012

Relative i-tunes novice because I hate it and hardly ever use it other than to load up my i-pod with mp3s I admit but...

 

Music all ripped in dBPoweramp to WAV on my NAS served reliably along with Album art etc ever since installation by Asset UPnP to network steaming on my KDS.

 

Wanted to try out my bedroom DIY DAC via a newly installed USB - I2S interface using my Mac as the source via i-tunes. Happily set i-tunes Media Folder location to my Music folder on my NAS in 'Preferences' and innocently ticked the box 'Keep i-tunes media folder organised', hit go and went out for a walk and shopping.

 

Some 10 hours later the little bar had crawled completely across the 'working' window and I opened the i-tunes interface on the MAC to be greeted by a very long list which admittedly was organised alphabetically by Artist but listed ALL the track 1's then all the track 2's with NO album art displayed.

 

Gave up and went to Asset to stream some music on the KDS. All my music folders were still there along with a load of new ones invented by i-tunes BUT there was NO music in my original folders!!!

 

A search this morning established that i-tunes evidently being pissed off that I use WAV had taken ALL 39,000 music tracks on my NAS removed them from their original folders and stuffed all of them in a giant new folder called 'Unknown music' and omitted to transfer the album art 'folder jpgs' along with em.

 

GRRRRR....@#*%#!!

 

Right now I am restoring order to my NAS music library via one of my backup HDDs. I reckon there is about 10 hours to go ( 39,000 tracks IS quite a lot).

 

I have thought I hated i-tunes for a long time. Now I am bloody sure I do.

 

Geoff

 

Posted on: 18 August 2012 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Richard, you certainly can , but search the web and you read horror stories of people migrating their iTunes AIFF collection to other platforms... As I found when I was looking into Maurice's response. But stick with iTunes for ever and a day you are fine.. It's just personally I find the iTunes metadata far too limiting, but it's a personal thing...

Simon

Posted on: 18 August 2012 by Richard Lord
Originally Posted by Simon-in-Suffolk:
Richard, you certainly can , but search the web and you read horror stories of people migrating their iTunes AIFF collection to other platforms... As I found when I was looking into Maurice's response. But stick with iTunes for ever and a day you are fine.. It's just personally I find the iTunes metadata far too limiting, but it's a personal thing...
Simon


Hi Simon,

You are a clever chap.  I read and am amazed at all this complexity.  I use ALAC with iTunes and it seems to work great.  I use the free Remote app on my iPad and it is an order of magnitude superior to the Naim DTC. I could not get either of the Naim apps to connect to my network!  Hence my decision to revert to sourcing off my MB Pro.  

 

No network, no problems, no offence.


Richard

Posted on: 19 August 2012 by AndyPat

Is there any truth in the rumour that the iTunes Appreciation Society is moving to Salem?

Posted on: 19 August 2012 by m0omo0
Originally Posted by Simon-in-Suffolk:

It's just personally I find the iTunes metadata far too limiting, but it's a personal thing...

Simon,

 

It's my turn to be intrigued. How's that ? Do you mean: the metadata that iTunes put into the files ? Because, for what I have seen (even if I don't use it for any other purpose than syncing), the metadata is not exceptional but a bit more complete than the usual basic info. It is kept in a separate set of files though, so not transferable.

 

If I remember well you're ripping with dBpoweramp. What kind of metadata do you use ? I've never used dBPA myself, but from the doc it seems to be more powerful than others for classical music where it adds extra tags for the conductor, performers, etc. that it gets from SonataDB. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to do the same with more "popular" music, though it could get such information (performers, engineers, label, etc.) from Rovi (AMG), like Naim does.

 

Thanks,

Maurice

Posted on: 19 August 2012 by Geoff P
Originally Posted by Geoff P:
Originally Posted by mrspoon:
Originally Posted by Geoff P:

I will bet if I convert a dB Poweramp Tagged WAV to AIFF i-tunes won't see any tags it understands.

 

dBpoweramp would write the Wave tags to the correct format for AIFF (id3v2), iTunes would see the tags.

Excellent news. This is why I love dB Poweramp.

Well I converted quite a few favourite albums to AIFF in a separated folder (copies, still have the original WAVs) using dB Poweramp Batch converter. Cleaned out i-tunes then pointed it at the AIFF conversion folder and added the contents to i-tunes

 

I can report that all the basic tags that I need ( Album & Artist, Track listing, Composer and Album art) were read correctly by i-tunes and the correct album hierarchy was created.

 

It seems that it is possible to move between WAV in a Windows based environment ( WHS) and AIFF in i-tunes on a Mac if you are prepared to duplicate audio files and have plenty of spare disk space.

 

Geoff