I was backing up my purchases from the iTunes store when I realized that not all of my downloads came from iTunes. (I got them from legit sources, NOT p2p) Is there a way for iTunes to search for them? I’d rather not look through the entire library.
Are you asking if there is a way to have iTunes differentiate between songs that you purchased through iTunes and songs that you downloaded from other sources? There should be an automatically-created playlist called “Purchased” which will have just the songs you bought from iTunes. Anything not in that playlist was acquired through other means (downloaded or ripped from a CD). Also, I believe that all purchased songs will be in AAC format, whereas most (if not all) downloaded songs will be in MP3. So you could create a smart playlist with “format=MP3” (I think iTunes calls it something other than “format”, though) as the criterion.
That’s exactly what I want. Backing up the “Purchased” playlist is what reminded me that I have downloads from sources other than iTunes. I’ll try the smart playlist that you mentioned.
I thought of a clearer way to put the question: How do I create a smart playlist that filters out songs ripped from CDs?
If you use a filter of “Kind contains ‘Protected’”, it should only pull up purchased items. You can add “Kind contains ‘audio’” to limit it to just songs if you have TV shows or such that you don’t want to include.
Also, if you rip songs from CDs into AAC format, then what you should end up with is basically the three types of songs like this:
purchased from iTunes, kind will be “Protected AAC”
ripped from CD, kind will be “AAC”
downloaded from elsewhere, kind will be “MP3”
So to get a playlist of just your downloaded songs, you’d make a smart playlist with “Kind is MP3”.
To get a playlist with both purchased songs and downloaded songs, but not ripped songs, you’d make the smart playlist with the top dropdown set to “any of” (i.e. add a song if any of the following conditions is true) and the two conditions “kind contains protected”, "kind contains “MP3”.
I created a smart playlist with “Kind is MP3” but I got nothing. I had to type"Kind is mpeg audio file." That didn’t work though because all of my CDs were ripped as mp3s so everything I had showed up in the smart playlist.
All I’m trying to do is save myself the tedium of scrolling through 7000 songs looking to find the less than 100 songs that I downloaded, but didn’t get from iTunes.
Did you try my suggestion to look for Protected? Purchased files are not MP3 or mpeg so that wouldn’t work as you found.
Yeah I just tried that and nothing showed up. I think that only songs I have that are protected are the songs I got from iTunes.
Sorry, I misunderstood. You want to find the songs you downloaded as MP3 vs the songs you ripped as MP3. That is… unlikely. Unless maybe there is a difference in the bitrate. Like if you always rip stuff at 160kbps, and most downloads are 128kbps, that would be a way to tell. But it’s not going to be foolproof.