This is one of my biggest beefs. Most of what I listen to is downloaded, loaded onto the iPod, listened to once, and deleted after backing up on long-term storage. Here’s how I do it: download into my specially set-up download folder; drag into the iPod playlist via the iTunes interface (without ever importing into iTunes - this is important); back up and delete. Here’s how iTunes would like me to do it: download; import into iTunes, causing it to make a new copy of the file hiding somewhere obscure and doubling the disk space taken up; find it in the iTunes library and put it into whatever playlist I want; sync the iPod, which may or may not result in my file being where I want it; then delete the file from (a) the iTunes library, (b) wherever the extra copy got stashed, and (c) the original download folder. My way’s a lot easier, honestly.
Itunes sorts by default, you saying he was talking about this behavior while itunes is installed? Because to me it looks it was before itunes.
Let’s say you’re right though. This means apple’s programmers don’t even use basic good programming like stopping gracefully, or non destructively, during a failure. And destroying a good identifying file name with “track 1 - unknown artist” is definitely a failure if I ever saw one.
Also, during my flirts with a hackentosh to learn OS X maintenance and configuration (know your enemy, incase you have to make service calls on your enemy), itunes didn’t remove my music from it’s folders. It made copies in it’s own folders. Although that might have been special behavior. I was using the NTFS-3g file system driver to access music on NTFS partitions because the standard OS X NTFS driver didn’t have write support. Itunes might have been coded to just make copies of files on NTFS partitions.
Anyway the original files should have been secure with the original file name.
Edit:
Also Smeghead’s post seems to confirm it’s a behavior across the board, not just in the hackentosh.
Also berff rereading my post it was kinda rude to you. Sorry yo.
That’s not a failure–that’s just using ID3 tags to write filenames, which is what iTunes does if you let it organize your music for you. If you have been manually organizing your music (e.g., with filenames in the format “Artist - Album - Track Number - Track Title”), you might have never bothered to correct the ID3 tags for those files, or even create them at all. The application can’t understand that the filename “Andrew Bird - Noble Beast - 02 - Masterswarm.mp3” is anything but gibberish, so instead, it renames it based on the information that is available in the ID3 tags, which, if the tag is blank, would be something like “0 Unknown.mp3.”
I forget exactly how this works since I just have all of my music in the iTunes directory so that iTunes keeps it organized (I’m whipped), but IIRC there’s an option to copy files to the iTunes directory when you import them to the library.
If there’s nothing in the ID3 tags why not just skip that file, or if necessary/desired, save it to ask the user what to do about it?
I could see skipping some things like album, or year if missing but artist and song title are pretty basic things needed to identify the tune. If for some reason I lost the artist and title data on all my tunes it’d take days to manually rebuild it.
Some might argue that a piece of software that rewrites filenames based on empty metadata is pretty stupid, and that such stupidity is a failure in and of itself. The presence or otherwise of an ID3 tag is not, after all, that difficult to verify.
Actually thinking on it, since it doesn’t delete the original file, it isn’t destructive, just badly implemented.
This having half my classes for the summer done rules. So much time to think about things like this.
Because it’s an application, not a human being. It can’t tell if your filename is storing useful information or not. So it’s making the filename consistent with the other filenames. Expecting some kind of failsafe from a program that has so many other flaws… Heh. You’re more optimistic than I am.
If, else statements, and Boolean logic statements are programming 101. Are you saying checking that song title, album info isn’t null couldn’t be accomplished with those?
So, I have a new iPhone, and am experiencing iTunes for the first time, rather reluctantly, and with much regret, I was hoping to figure out how to bypass it but I’m not that good with workarounds.
I had iTunes look in a folder I made with just 2 albums in it (just for iTunes and my experiment). It took the tracks from each album and split them up so most of the tracks are sitting nicely with their album name and album art, but there are a couple tracks split off with no album art and no album name.
What the hell happened there? I had it look for album art on the orphaned tracks, and iTunes can’t find any, with the rest of the album sitting right above the naked track, now WTF? Talk about unintuitive, I’m obviously not bright enough to figure out how to get iTunes to marry all the tracks with the album they belong to. This makes no sense.
Any words from more experienced iTunes haters but use it anyway?
How did you import the albums? Did you use iTunes? I have no idea how iTunes deals with music ripped using a different program, because I’ve always done it with iTunes. I also don’t know why being in that folder would give iTunes a hint as to what the album is - it’s not looking at that information.
Depending on the number of songs you have that don’t have information, you may just want to input the info yourself. Right click on the title, and select “Get Info”. Hit the “Info” tab, and input.
Are all the songs from the album from the same source and hence labelled the same way?
iTunes will treat a song from the album “Thriller” differently than “thriller” and if their tags have different content, it may find the artwork for one but not the other due to one tag having sufficient info and the other not.
… or it may just be a piece of shit.
I’m not saying it couldn’t be done–I’m aware that it would be relatively simple. I’m just saying you’re expecting a level of complexity and nuance that the application generally fails to demonstrate across the board. Plus, what do you do if it has an artist, but no title? Or vice-versa? It’s much easier to just decide to treat all files in exactly the same way, rather than try to create special rules for every possible circumstance.
So it’s relatively simple to implement, would enhance the usability of itunes, and would be intuitive to the user, but it’s too high a level of complexity?
Kind of sums up the problem’s with Apple’s philosophy in a nutshell. Be bloody minded into doing it one way and expect to the world to adapt to it’s foolishness.
Edit: Any important data that’s missing can be prompted for the user to choose an action (skip, type in name, name it “track1”, etc.)
I had iTunes look in the folder I made for importing MP3s to it. You have to tell iTunes (or any media player) where to look in order to populate the library. I have nearly 30 gigs of music consisting of MP3s and WMAs from stuff I purchased online and my own CD collection. AFAIK, all music stored in this way has tags that pretty much all players can read, and those tags contain track, artist, album art info and the like, so no matter where it’s stored the tags are with it, and players like iTunes are supposed to recognize it. Well, iTunes sort of did that.
Your “get info” advise is very helpful, I’m finding iTunes to not be as intuitive as I’d like, so tidbits like yours in this thread have been more useful than you may know!
Aha! That did the trick, with the “get info” advice from above, I edited album names so they were more plain and the bracketed stuff, such as [EXPLICIT] and [Digital Deluxe] were removed. iTunes then recognized them and assigned the album art accordingly.
Thanks to you both! Now the cover flow looks neato.
Just because the mechanics for implementation are simple doesn’t mean the rules to determine the application of those mechanics can’t be complex.
Cutting someone with a knife? Simple. Surgery? Complex.
What if the user just imported several thousand songs?
Coding that would be pretty easy. I don’t know c++ yet, which I’m guessing itunes is coded in, but some speudo-c+±coding would be:
bool id3Complete;
if (songTitleVar == null) || (albumTitleVar == null) {
id3Complete = false;
...codefor handling the errant files and setting id3Complete back to true if the files have been handled on the spot....
}
else {
id3Complete = true;
}
if (id3Complete == true) {
..normal code...
}
else {
... add to list for attention later...
}
All that does is check for the required data and ask for user input if it’s missing. Making the dialogs for that would be relatively trivial GUI work. In addition it’s flexable in that it can handle the situation being handled on the spot, or not.
A basic run down it sets a Boolean true/false variable. Then it checks the id3 data to see if the important is complete using an if comparison, and else set. if it’s incomplete it sets id3complete to false. if is complete, or completed, then it sets it back to true. Finally an if/else takes action depending on it’s case.
Which brings up the question of why would you want thousands of unnamed songs anyway? 'Alright track 476! Let’s rock out! \m/".
Anyway this isn’t a particularly unique situation. For example file management utilities often have to handle copying files over other files. Standard MO is to give the user an option to repeat an action for that situation. Antivirus software usually finishes the scan then gives a multiselectable listbox of files that need attention.
Either solution is pretty routine.
Grrr. So I fire up Rhythmbox in Ubuntu since I’ve been exploring Windows alternatives, and point it to my Windows partition where all of my music is stored. I find that my iTunes folders are filled with double and triple duplicate files of hundreds of songs. Bad sync? Incomplete restore? Who knows.
The kicker, if I run iTunes no duplicates show up, it can’t see them for some stupid reason. So I’ve apparently been wasting several GB of disk space for the past year and a half.
Ugh, are those visible just by browsing the folders too? I keep all my music on an external hard drive and I’m seriously pondering how my drive space filled up so quickly with the (relatively) small amount of music I have on there.
Did you read anything I wrote? For the umpteenth time, yes, it would be easy to code. What is not easy is coming to a consensus about what to do when there’s no data in one or more fields (i.e., how to apply the code). I feel like I’m hammering my head against a wall here. Is there something I’m saying that you’re just not understanding?
Someone might not want to sit down right then and there and go through several thousand error messages, is what I’m saying.
Poor analogy. If I’m copying files to a directory, there’s a good chance I’m going to want to deal with all duplicates the same way. With converting ID3 tags to filenames, I’m probably going to want to look at every single “no tag” file individually.