I’m finally starting to become happy with the setup I have on my home network for managing my mp3s. Once I have all the kinks are ironed out, I’ll be sure to publish a brief step-by-step how-to in case anyone is interested in setting up something similar.
Until that time, I wanted to share something I’ve learned about iTunes7. Hopefully this will help someone avoid the iTunes headache I’ve recently developed.
iTunes Can Be Helpful
Well if it’s not clear already, I enjoy using iTunes as my default mp3 player. Even more surprising might be the fact that I actually enable the ‘Keep iTunes Music folder organized’ option. Sure, there are some inherent annoyances with giving iTunes that much control over your files but for me personally, the pros outweigh the cons.
I like the fact that I can use iTunes to organize my genres, group compilations together, mass change artist information, identify duplicates, etc… and everyone of those changes is made to both the id3 tag (when appropriate) and the file name/location itself.
Some Background
I use Unison to basically mirror my library from a master location to the various PCs on my network. This isn’t the typical master-slave setup however, one of the instructions I give Unison is to assume the most recent version of a file is the correct version. This way if I update the album art or change a typo in an artist’s name, I can make that change on my remote PC and push it to the master machine.
Comment Garbage
Unison uses rsync so that it only sends files that have actually been changed. Shortly after upgrading to iTunes7, I noticed that a large number of files had been changed for no apparent reason.
Upon closer instruction I noticed that the comments field for each of those changed songs was populated with some sort of encoded information that looks something like this:
0000121E 00000C71 00006417 00002D9A…..
I scoured Google and the like for possible help on this topic but my results only suggested that I disable the already turned off ‘Sound Check’ option in iTunes.
Eureka
I finally started looking for ‘features’ new to iTunes7 and learned one of those new features is ‘Gapless Playback‘. Basically, this means that iTunes processes your music file and determines the true length of it so it can immediately start the next track with no load delay in between.
This is a fantastic feature especially for live music or Pink Floyd fans. However, for some strange reason, the information iTunes needs for processing appears to be is stored in the comments field. (Does anyone know why iTunes doesn’t put it in a new attribute located in the XML file?)
Workaround Solution
Because Apple decided to not put an option in ‘Preferences’ that will enable/disable gapless playback altogether, I now have to manually flag all new music in my library as not gapless. Truthfully, I’m thankful there’s even a place to flag it as such. (Any why wouldn’t iTunes default each track to gapless if the method of recording the information was so dirty?…)
To flag all your music as gapless:
- Select all the items in your library (Ctrl-A)
- Select ‘Get Info’
- Check the ‘Gapless Album’ field (bottom right) with a ‘No’ value.
Of course, now you’ll also have to remember to manually flag all new music in your library as gapless.
If anyone knows of a better way to handle this please let me know
9 Comments
“I like the fact that I can use iTunes to organize my genres … mass change artist information, identify duplicates, etc”
Whadup J,
Dont wanna rock your boat, but there’s better programs than itunes to manage mp3 metadata…. although some fields in itunes are proprietary to apple (e.g. play/skip count, last played/skipped, ratings, groupings…). Not sure why the ratings isnt stored in the id3… any comments Steve? Didnt think so.
Anyways, just thought I’d throw out the 2 programs that I’ve used extensively over the years to manage audio metadata:
http://www.fliptech.net/shuffleplay (free, but no longer developed)
http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm (free 30 day trial, $30 to buy, or just keep downloading the new betas ;.) )
I still use iTunes, and every once in a while will edit the id3 that way, but these other 2 programs (not totally sure about shuffleplay anymore since it hasnt been developed since 02′) are better & more efficient IMO. Worth trying out if only to see some of the features that arent available in iTunes.
Hey Brian, Thanks for the note.
I checked out those products you suggested - SoftPointer’s Tag & Replace is especially impressive. I’ll play with it some more but it looks like this might a nice addition to my music library management suite.
One of the main reasons I’m using iTunes is for the convenience of playback and tag editing (among other things) in a single solution. I might end up turning off the “Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized” option if I end up really liking Tag & Replace but I doubt that I’ll find a playback solution that ends up replacing it.
P.S. I’ve used this lightweight program for quite a while to grab my album art (not sure if it’s still supported). I haven’t used the iTunes album art downloader because it requires you to create a store account but this one works well for small batches of files at a time.
Yea, pretty sure Tag & Rename can grab album art as well. Not totally sure tho, as I dont really mess with album art ever. You can probably use T&R simultaneous with iTunes, since iTunes (I believe) still does read from the id3 tag, and then add some other metadata on. So basically, update the id3 tags in T&R, and it should reflect the changes in iTunes. Let me know if that’s true.
As for shuffleplay, its probably too old to support some of the newer metadata. But that was a sweet program to use for managing my mp3s that I had burned to CD. You could create what are called “virtual drives”, and it would read & store all the id3 information of the mp3s (for each cd). That way, I could search through my mp3s without actually having the media that it was on present. Dopeness. I need to find something like this for my TV shows that are burned to DVRs now, which are ~200+ in number. Yes, 200 x 4.7gb = way too many damn TV shows.
P.S.- can you set an option in your blog software so that I get a notification of a response to any of my comments? That’d be cool.
I just got my 2000t and all of my songs are skipping in iTunes, and I cant figure out why. If someone could help me out and tell me how to fix this I would really appreciate it because its driving me crazy. Thanks for the replys.
I found this while trying to figure out what was in the comment field of some of my stuff.
I figured I would suggest ID3-TagIT it is a free ID3 tag editor that I have been using for a while. Probably not as full featured as Tag&Rename though, never knew about that one, I may have to check it out.
Hello, somebody is using Itunes portable? I do and it gives me an error saying: “the ipod … cannot be synced” What does it mean?
ndcklxb rbyvwmzpk boims hqsd upmnljkh zovx gtijzyw
Thank you for your article. I was somewhat released to see someone else has the same or similar problem. However your fix didn’t seem to work for me unfortunately.
Here’s my situation: I have iTunes 8.0.0.3 and my backup indicates that last Wednesday night my entire collection was modified. This boiled down even for me to something very strange happening with the comment tag:
- Currently all my MP3 files have the 10 long integers in the comment field. (e.g., “000005A4 00000000 000017EF 00000000 0003D0D5 00000000 00005B13 00000000 0003D0A7 00000000”)
- If I put comments with MP3/Tag Studio or Winamp, iTunes happily ignores it
- iTunes must store comments somewhere in the XML library file (where the Rating tag is) because from an iTunes point of view you can edit Comments (via Get Info) and Comments are persisted, but again, not in the COMM field apparently!
Initially I thought of selecting everything in MP3/Tag studio and just write a blank Comment (my original precious Comments are already gone deleted by iTunes, so might as well), but this would not help as iTunes disregards it. And if I set my Comment tag in iTunes, I would only see it there, but not in Winamp or other s/w (which is unacceptable).
Also, none of my music is gapless (“Part of a gapless album” always unchecked) and I have no Sound Check (ie, in preferences / Playback / the Sound Check option is unchecked).
Any help would be greatly appreciate, I’m kinda panicking over here…
Simon
I cannot say how right you are!!! These other people have failed to see your point. I am going to put a link on my blog back to you ok?