I spent the last month importing every single CD I own. I imported it all to a LaCie external drive.
I opened Itunes today, and it “organized” my external hd and 90% of my music is gone. Here is what I need besides a hockey puck sized sedative and a box of kleenex.
All I fucking want is to import all of my music in .aiff to my LaCie external hd. Then, once it is all there, I want to be able to make sure it can not be deleted, and I can create playlists for my iphone.
That is it. That is all I want. I am reformatting my LaCie, I am deleting everything with my MusicMonkey Pro and doing a fresh install, and I am doing the same with itunes. I am on a Windows PC running Win10 64 bit, and I have a macbook pro as well.
I want point by point instructions. If I need another application, let me know. I will give you my god damned phone number so you can walk me through this. I am ready to fucking break shit.
*** Update ***
Also, I am in a pretty fucking volatile mood right about now so if you have nothing to offer other than “that sucks” or “buy a radio” this is not the goddamned cocksucking thread for you or your shitfuckery.
mr_gravity
Buy a radio.
John Cole
@mr_gravity: you just made the list buddy
narya
lurking, because I want something very similar.
MomSense
This is the only time when having an obnoxious teen comes in handy. I wish I could help.
The Dangerman
Is this a thread where we talk about Mac’s vs. Windows vs. Linux?
/runs and hides
NJDave
Did iTunes organize by moving all files into an iTunes folder on your hard drive? It assumes that’s where you want it.
Mike in Arlington
Before you do anything drastic:
It may have imported/consolidated your music to your main drive when it organized your files. Can you see the music you imported in iTunes? if so, can you play it?
The other possibility is that it stuck it into a sub-folder on your LaCie drive. Does windows report your LaCie drive as having less empty space as you expected?
Gin & Tonic
@The Dangerman: We could. We could also debate AIFF vs FLAC.
PonB
John – the key here is to change the location of your music library. On the Mac, go to Preferences | Advanced. You will see a box at the top labeled “iTunes Media Library Location”. Press the Change button next to it and navigate to where your external drive music location is, and press Save, Mine says “Volumes/LCS_iTunes/iTunes Music”. This folder structure equates to “External Drives/Drive/Holding Folder”. I have a screen shot, but can’t put it in the comment.
I’ve been running my iTunes off an external drive for a few years now, and it works fine as long as the drive is connected. Be sure to change this location before the “intelligence” of iTunes kicks in and you lose everything again – in other words, don’t let it organize anything for you.
Good Luck!
Droppy
It’s because of stuff like this that I stopped listening to music. I now just hear it accidentally. It is one of those things, like thermostats which you can’t just turn up or down, which have ruined my life. P.S. I am old, I am cranky, and I would prefer it if you would get off my lawn.
Robert Camner
It is very unlikely that iTunes “organized” the music and in so doing deleted it! iTunes COPIES music to its desired location and, optionally, DELETES the music files from their original location. It is also possible to move the iTunes library to your external drive
Jerzy Russian
How did you import all of the CDs? If you use iTunes to import all of the CDs, you should be able to export the library onto the external drive.
The Dangerman
@Gin & Tonic:
Fuck, I’m getting old; I’ve never heard of FLAC.
At one time, I was on the cutting edge of this stuff (moved to Seattle to make my fortune in the Internet Game just as the Net was taking off in early 95; didn’t make my fortune and drove madly back to CA to see sunshine more than a couple days a year, and, yes, when Seattle is pretty those few days (hours?), it IS lovely).
Now, I have to call in a nephew or niece to explain this shit to me.
dmsilev
iTunes defaults to moving music into a sub-folder of your home directory, i.e. off the external drive and onto your internal. On the Mac, it uses ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music, and I imagine it’s similar on the Windows version. Go digging around in your home folder and you should find all of your stuff.
You can change this in iTunes Preferences, on the Advanced tab. There’s an option to change iTunes Library location.
ruemara
You’ve actually gotten good suggestions here. Plus you need to tell iTunes to not do things like that if you want music stored in a specific site. But, good on you. I’m only 10 tapes into my quest digitze, tag and store my entire tape collection from the 80’s.
I hate to get naggy, but you are running a backup server, right? You should be able to restore anything if it was truly deleted.
hovercraft
I wonder if this John Cole guy is familiar with Balloon Juice traditions, maybe someone should explain to him that this is the home of shitfuckery and no threads are immune from it.
Where the hell are all the kids you know?
In the meantime try the radio, it’s much simpler.
JohnO
I’ve long been amused by the “quit date” most of us have for learning new shit. JC, you haven’t reached yours yet, and that’s commendable.
However, the stress you’re creating for yourself might make it all a net negative, particularly if you blow some sort of circulatory or cerebral gasket, since we’ve elected a lunatic who may blow us all up because someone messed up his hair, or because Hannity isn’t universally beloved, et al.
So it’s hard not to laugh and shout, #firstworldproblems.
You’re a very good man, John Cole, and I love and miss your rants.
Eric Udell
My best suggestion is to use a program other than iTunes to convert the files and SAVE THOSE FILES SEPARATELY WITH A SEPARATE BACKUP COPY, only allowing iTunes to work with a copy of the files. I no longer use iTunes in part because of crap like this, but also because I’ve abandoned the whole iStuff infrastructure, with the exception of a single 160G iPod because there’s nothing else that really compares. I work in IT and I’ve had several folks come to me with similar issues with their iTunes library.
We converted about 700 CD’s a few years ago to 256kbps MP3’s ( I can’t really hear the difference compared to an uncompressed file, so the convenience and file size is worth it to me, YMMV ) and now use MediaMonkey to sync files with the iPod. As an extra backup, I uploaded all of my MP3’s to Google ( 50k songs for free ) and can stream them on my phone/tablet/chromecast if I choose, or download them if I need to.
Laura
@Droppy: here’s an onion for your rope belt.
TenguPhule
Perhaps before you attempt this a second time, you make sure your music files are set to read only? At least that way Itunes can’t delete it.
LongHairedWeirdo
@NJDave: I’ve also found that you can turn that option off (um, at least on Windows – I probably shouldn’t talk about “in general” because I was about to recommend MusicBee, which has been *perfect* for me, but… um… I think John uses a Mac?)
Re: “Playlists for my phone” – you know, that is one Killer App that’s haunted me. I use an Android – I would love to put together a few play lists, but it seems just easier to import only the music for a generic playlist and put it on shuffle.
John, good luck – I know how frustrating it can be when it seems like something should be stone-cold-stupid-easy, and it probably is, only, gee, no one thinks to explain how it’s done (probably because to everyone else, it’s stone-cold-stupid-easy[1]).
[1] You know, like finding the obscure synonyms for SQL Server memory clerks when trying to find the memory pressure in an OLAP database undergoing regular data loads with multiple concurrent… WHAT?
(Edited to correct typo. People who think I mess up ‘thing’ and ‘think’ have another thing, er, I mean, THINK coming.)
Roger Moore
@Mike in Arlington:
I’m definitely going to go with not doing anything rash until fully investigating the situation. You’ve just spent weeks importing all this stuff, and you’d really like to avoid doing it again. Software like iTunes generally doesn’t just mass delete stuff without prompting, so it’s very likely all your hard work has not been trashed. Spend a while trying to figure out where your music disappeared to, and make sure it’s really gone, before doing anything irreversible like formatting your disk.
Singing Truth to Power
@hovercraft: I haven’t laughed so hard in days! Sorry, John Cole, but . . .
I spent hours last week sorting through dusty cassettes. Dumped a bunch into a St. Vincent box, but there’s great music in the remaining stack of cassettes that I don’t see a point in throwing away and re-buying. I’m not quite embarrassed to say that I’m in the market for a new cassette player. I did make it to the age of CDs, and stopped there.
schrodingers_cat
PSA: If you want to help JGC,
Send him suggestions by email, in all CAPS. kthxbai
eldorado
flac isn’t new. it’s just a lossless format which means the file sizes are (were) huge and (cheap now) expensive to archive. only my very serious audiophile friends used this format before storage dropped to almost free.
Marc
@schrodingers_cat: Make sure to make the subject line something informative, like “An Important Business Opportunity”.
Jay S
For a project that takes significant time and energy it is probably worthwhile to do periodic backups to have a recent recovery point to go back to. Advice I may not always follow, but you might if you rebuild your library.
I have heard to many Itunes horror stories to trust it myself.
George Spiggott
@The Dangerman:
Roger Moore
@The Dangerman:
Odd, because FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) has been around for a while. It’s a nice choice because it’s lossless but still gives substantial compression over WAVs. It’s a good format if you’re either a perfectionist who doesn’t want to lose any data from the original CD or if you use something like MP3 or Ogg but would like to be able to re-encode at different bitrates depending on how you’re going to use it.
Singing Truth to Power
@Droppy: Are we related?
MattF
@PonB: Yup. I did this many years ago, and I had to deal with iTunes– specifically by telling iTunes where my music files were. And then one day I bought a new iMac, migrated my stuff to the new machine and all the music got migrated to the new iMac’s HD. At which point I got the message, zoned out and just let macOS do its thing. The moral seems to be that you can do things in your own very special way if you want to, but eventually Apple will win.
ETA: And back everything up. Repeatedly. I actually have –three– backups– a ‘cold’ backup on a HD that’s usually off, a Time machine backup -and- a cloud backup. And that’s the -minimum- backup, IMO.
Doug R
For some stupid reason randomly every month or so my windows 10 sound stops working and I have to disable a sound driver. I suspect it has something to do with iTunes updates, but it’s annoying as hell.
MaryL
Something similar happened to me a couple years ago when I transferred all of my music from my iPhone 5 to my new computer in order to then move it to my new iPhone. ITunes on my computer either deleted or didn’t transfer everything that wasn’t purchased from Apple, and I reset my iPhone 5 to give to my husband before I realized that most of the files didn’t transfer. Fortunately I have most of it on an external drive, but I can’t figure out how to put it on my iPhone. If anyone has an suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
Mineshaft Gap
I am willing to bet ITunes moved those files somewhere on your machine.
I did this years ago. I imported every CD I owned into ITunes. Installed Google Play Music Manager. Let Google Play Music Manager read all my ITunes music files into my Google Account. Installed Google Play Music on my phone (both Android and IPhone). Now I listen to Google Play Music on my phone, for free. Google Play Music Manager also imports any playlists you create in ITunes.
cat
On itunes:
Edit->Preferences then goto Advanced tab. It will show you where itunes moved all your music to after you imported it. You can change the media directory if you want, stop it from moving files on import, etc.
I would caution against using an external drive on windows to store your library. Windows gives zero fucks about making sure the last drive letter assigned to a removable drive is the only letter it uses for that drive. You can change them after they have been mounted by windows but you will have to remap the drive letter often.
****update****
To make your life easier, change the drive letter of your external drive do something in the middle of the unused region. ‘M’ is a good starting point IMO.
***************
That being said what I would do in your situation:
1. Find where itunes moved all my music. see above
2. Close itunes and make sure its not hiding in the system tray or anywhere.
3. Copy the folder from step 1 onto the external drive.
4. Rename the folder from step 1 so itunes can’t find it
5. Restart itunes. Change the default itunes library folder to your extern drive. Use unique folder name
6. File->Import Directory using the folder you made in step 3.
7. Wait
8. Realize why apple crated Apple Music and ponder if ~10 a month for life is worth not having to care about this.
mai naem mobile
If you move to Canada can you import it from here?
Captain Sunshine
Everything following is based on iTunes for Windows, but the menu structure should be the same. How you get there (command-click vs right-click) might be different.
You should be able to change your library folder selection in iTunes, under Edit –>Preferences –> Advanced tab.
iTunes does copy files to the default “iTunes Media” folder on your local hard drive, unless you tell it not to. You can turn that off under Preferences –> Advanced. In the same tab, you can also turn off iTunes’ organization scheme, so that you can organize your music yourself. When iTunes organizes your music, it sorts it by artist first (top folder), then album (subfolder).
If you still have all of your music somewhere, you can copy it all back to your external hard drive. Keep iTunes off and re-organize your music, and unplug the drive. Open iTunes and change the settings as above. Then you need to move the iTunes media directory files (where iTunes keeps a copy of your music library structure) out of whatever location your Mac has it in (I don’t know where this is on a Mac, but it’s easy to find directions on “rebuilding your iTunes library” online). Copy it to another folder, or delete it if you want, but make sure iTunes can’t find it. Re-open iTunes, and go back to Preferences –> Advanced, and select your music folder. If you’ve turned off “organize my music” and “copy music to iTunes media folder,” and you have your music organized on your external drive, iTunes should go through your music and rebuild the music library using your directory structure. This takes a while. It also takes a while for iTunes to go out and find all of the album artwork. If you’ve left any music in your local drive iTunes folder, you’ll get duplicates of your songs in iTunes, so go back and delete anything iTunes moved over there before you rebuild the library.
Once the music library is built, you should be all done. The only thing you need to remember is what iTunes does with new music. Once you have iTunes all set, you can use it to rip any new music off of CDs you want, or buy anything from the iTunes store, but iTunes will create a folder in your music library folder for the artist, with a subfolder for the album, just like it does if you let it organize your music. You’ll have to go in and move the music around if you want to keep your directory structure, then you’ll have to go in and either re-build your music library periodically, or find the music tracks in iTunes, command-click on one song and select Properties, and point iTunes to where you moved the file. When you click OK, it will ask you whether you want to use the new music location to find other tracks iTunes can’t locate. If you say Yes, iTunes should locate the rest of the album tracks in the folder and slot their locations in properly.
Kind of clunky, but once you get it set, it should work for you.
If any of this needs correcting, everybody chime in. But I’m pretty sure I got all of that right.
AnnaN
Am a little unclear on everything except the no fuckery. So my interpretation with solution:
1) External HD had library which has now been wiped out.
2) Music is still on your Mac in the iTunes Library.
3) You want iTunes to leave your HD the fuck alone.
4) You want to send all music from iTunes Library to external HD in aiff.
5) Step by Step: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4902186?tstart=0
Blow your nose, wipe your eyes, forget the sedative (snuggle your face into a willing cat tummy), and see if you can get someone to give you a foot rub.
gvg
At this point I would ask if you can pay someone else to do it for you.
mak
Think we got a new tag right here: TINTGCTFYOYS*
(*this is not the goddamned cocksucking thread for you or your shitfuckery).
geg6
LOL! Hire someone to do it for you. You know college-age kids. I’m sure any one of them can get it done.
cokane
the steelers suck, Cole
Mike in Arlington
One other thing just occurred to me. AIFF takes up a ton of HD space, you might be better off converting to Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) or a high bitrate (I typically use 320 kbps) AAC.
You can keep your lossless files (either AIFF or ALAC) for your home devices (if you use a NAS). (My OCD-driven process is to rip CDs to WAV files, check the id3 tags, then convert to ALAC and AAC using XLD (an open source audio converter for the mac which does the job pretty quickly). The WAV files are for safe keeping, the ALAC is for my stereo and the AAC are for my iphone/ipod (yes, I still have an iPod).
burnspbesq
@cat:
If you care about SQ, Apple Music is the wrong answer, regardless of what the question is. The deficiencies of even 256k AAC vs. CD-resolution Apple Lossless are easily heard, even in mobile use. The audiophools I know (and I know plenty, being one myself) strongly prefer Tidal for streaming (Or Qobuz if you can spoof it into believing you’re not in the United States).
Mike in Arlington
Has anybody ever used one of the online cd ripping services? Is it worth it?
burnspbesq
@Captain Sunshine:
… and any band whose name begins with the word “the” ends up between Teddy Prendergass anf Thelonious Monk in the drive’s directory, although the Beatles are displayed between Bach and Beethoven on screen. Bizarre.
Brachiator
@John Cole: If you are still having issues, there are consistently good and relevant tips over at the ilounge site.
Bess
Two hard drives, John.
Store one at your parent’s house. Backup off site.
cat
@burnspbesq: Test after test shows humans are no better at picking lossless vs 256kAAC then a coin flip. Feel free to believe you special but spending months reripping 100’s of CD’s or spending $10 a month is an economic choice and should be made rationally.
Citizen_X
New tagline!
ETA: @mak: I say it’s gotta be spelled out!
Earl
@John —
The first thing to do is, if you’re worried the music is gone from your external drive, stop fucking about with it. Cleanly eject the drive then don’t fuck with it. If you do this quickly enough, you can probably get undelete software that will restore the files. In particular, if the drive is formatted fat32, there’s a good chance you can get the data back.
So step 1 is cleanly eject the drive *and don’t plug it in again* until you know what you’re doing.
If you find the music on your main drive, then no harm no foul; backup the itunes folder externally and you’re good.
I’d suggest Arq as $50-ish backup software that will backup to external drives *and* to google storage servers for roughly a penny a gigabyte-month.
If you need help, email at the hidden email address. I don’t have a ton of time today but I can make time this week to help. Note I only use macs, so if you are running a windows box I’m not sure how helpful I can be.
JustRuss
@Droppy: Preach it.
Cole, you might want to run Windirstat on your machine. It gives you a visual of where all the crap on your drives is. Might find your music. Free, lightweight, I find it handy:
https://windirstat.net/
Also, iTunes is an abomination.
Lee
Not sure if this is the advice you are looking for, but you might want to look at subsonic.
It is basically your own streaming service. Rip everything to an external drive then back said drive up. Either back it up with your own physical copy or online.
Then install the subsonic server locally following the instructions on how to ‘get online’ (it is very easy, I didn’t have a single issue getting it done).
Install the subsonic app on your phone. Once you are logged in, you stream your own library with the option to download whatever you want.
You can then share your library with others and giving the level of permissions you want them to have (read only, upload, etc).
LongHairedWeirdo
@cat: Due to this thread, I found a Lifehacker, non-scientific survey that showed that people couldn’t even tell the difference between 192kb VBR MP3 over CD, keeping in mind that these were not audiophiles. (How non-scientific? They dropped the 160kb VBR MP3 because it was the clear favorite – supposedly better than the higher bitrate VBR MP3.)
If you’re an audiophile, and you feel you must spend more money, I won’t stop you. I spend lots of money trying to make my own decent cup of espresso, and hobbyists are good for the economy.
But it seems most people lose the ability to tell the difference somewhere between 160kb VBR and 256kb VBR. (AAC should be similar audio quality, but a bit smaller, at the same bitrate, per Mr. Google. And, though it’s a popular mistake, in AAC, neither of the As stand for Apple; it’s just a decent codec that Apple happened to choose.)
ETA: just to be clear, “popular mistake” in this case means “a mistake that I, myself, happened to make, so I sure hope it’s popular” :-).
Earl
on mac/linux, start terminal then run this to find most music files. Type it exactly.
NB: You can’t copy/paste because the website is fucking up the quotes. The find command requires the quotes your keyboard types in terminal.
Also, the website is eating a backslash before the period in front of the left paren
So the beginning of the regex should read:
quote dot star backslash dot left paren …
better to just copy from this gist
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/bf6d108325c1b11346b8300795cc7e00
Mom Says I'm Handsome
John, I would strongly recommend that you ditch iTunes, as that is the weak link in this entire process. It’s classic Apple bloatware — features and UI that change with every release, all increasingly intended to force you down a funnel where you end up buying more shit on the Apple Store.
Two years ago I said “Fuck off” to iTunes* and replaced it with MediaMonkey. Based on what you’ve described as your core needs (some of us jackals DO actually read for comprehension), you need
1) A decent interface between yourself and your music files, which reside on a drive as a set of folders; and
2) A way to get those files onto (and off of) your iPhone.
MediaMonkey does both. You tell it where to import the music from; it goes and does that, showing you the info in a display reminiscent of old-school iTunes (it stores the info about your collection in an Access database that you could alter, if you were so inclined — like changing play counts). It NEVER moves the files, like iTunes does, and it doesn’t have a preference as to where new music is stored (like iTunes does). MM is agnostic as to file format, too, so you can store all your files in whatever format they’re already in (.wav, .aiff, .mpg, .flac, etc).
And MM treats your iPhone like your computer treats a flash drive — no need to link, sync, assign, or otherwise connect, just plug it in. You want to move an album to your phone? Right-click the album and select “Send to John’s iPhone”. You want to delete some songs? Select ’em and hit the Delete key.
Now, MM has some quirks about its own display that can be irritating, and you will have lots of opportunity to get pissed about that stuff. But I promise you it’s a different world with iTunes no longer around to fuck your music shit up.
* You will still need to use iTunes to back up your phone with all the other stuff you have on it — apps & app data, contacts, calendar, and photos. But you can instruct iTunes to ignore your music files when you do your backup.
Good luck!
marduk
@Mom Says I’m Handsome: “John, I would strongly recommend that you ditch iTunes, as that is the weak link in this entire process.”
So much. iTunes is the devil.
My Truth Hurts
Did you try turning it off and then turning it back on again?
trollhattan
@Mom Says I’m Handsome:
Interesting. Since Apple is busy euthanizing the ipod and the massive-storage Classic is already done in, I’m tackling a FiiO player, which has a far better DAC and importantly, uses micro SD cards instead of internal storage so can be made yuge.
The interface is really crude but the sound is great and now I can ditch itunes, so will look at your suggestion. I want to keep my music on a drive attached to my router so it’s always available.
mr_gravity
test
mr_gravity
it seemed funny at the time.
EllenR
I’m in a similar boat. Hundreds of CDs, including classical, that I used to play in a huge carousel player. I like music on 24/7. No one makes multi CD players anymore. Just in case you can’t face it, we’ve started a subscription to Tidal.com They play entire albums if you like, and have an optional HiFi service. No commercials, great sound quality, very good collections.
Josh R
I’ve been experimenting with Plex. Freeware for PC. Requires a onetime purchase for access via mobile device. Has options for cloud based stuff which require an ongoing subscription which I am not about to pony up for. This sets up a streaming server on your PC.
The problem I was trying to solve was having access to my music on my computer from anywhere in the house. I, like you, have a large library of music, and if I’m working upstairs, want to be able to listen to my iPod with my library of music on it, rather than having to be in front of my computer. For the $5 I put into it, it seems to be doing OK.
But – I am not 100% happy with it. The database management part of it seems cryptic, and playlist management is crap tbh. It doesn’t look like it has support for smart playlists for example. It also handles video streaming, which may explain why the music library options aren’t very advanced. And I’m not sure of its support for lossless formats (My library is mostly 320kbps MP3)
Caveats aside, it does handle the basic job I want it to do, which is allow me to play music anywhere in my house.
That may not be what you are looking for, but thought I’d share it.
cthulhu
FWIW:
1) Use EAC to rip CDs to .flac
2) Manage my library with MediaMonkey
3) Use Subsonic to make my library available to my phone and everywhere else in the world with an internet connection. (A library you can share with others via a login/pw)
The steps are easy and I like the functions of each program.
Certainly iTunes and Windows try to make it easy but they also implement various strategies to root out piracy. I paid for all my stuff and I don’t need some program checking through it on a regular basis. And at least in iTunes’ case, sometimes swapping out different recordings/masters of a song or album because…I guess some reason. And of course, I don’t want the 2000+ albums I have in my library to suddenly disappear or become inaccessible because of a weird quirk in an iTunes/Windows update (which has happened to others).
Marge feiner
I used to call my son when I got stuck. But he is getting too old too. So now I call my teenage grandsons. Find a kid and it will be done in no time at all.
trollhattan
@cthulhu:
Is that the reason behind some songs becoming magically corrupted? It’s a pretty common occurrence in my library (15+k songs) and drives me bonkers because I have to later somehow remember which ones then delete and re-rip the disk. Ugh.
EBT
Apple software for Windows operating systems has, in my experience, always been a nightmare. My assumption is that they are purposely done poorly to discourage people away from Windows. My personal solution is to just use DoubleTwist, but that is because my primary device is an android and the computer is just for storage.
burnspbesq
@cat:
The design of all of thoseso-called “studies” makes them inherently unreliable, so shove them and your supercilious attitude … in your ear.
Lee
@Josh R:
I also use Plex. I use in ‘in-house’ and stream with SubSonic.
Many others also stream with Plex.
@Mom Says I’m Handsome: Solid advice in entire post.
Eric
Probably already resolved, but the biggest/easiest change is to drop Itunes. It’s a useful music program for teens who have about 20 singles bought digitally, but it’s terrible for larger collections.
Itunes moves everything into its own directory and finds/sorts things entirely by the code tags on the music, so if title, name, album, etc, aren’t exactly what you expect, you’ll never find them in itunes. (And if you’ve got odd stuff, live music, bootlegs, remixes, etc, good luck.) Itunes doesn’t just let you open by folder or drag and drop music, the way anyone who knows how to use a computer to set up logical folder systems would prefer. Itunes is for people who leave files unsorted in default temp directories.
I was never happier than when my old ipod mini broke so I could just buy a simple (1/5th the cost) mp3 player and use drag and drop directory structure and my own playlists, instead of wading through the horrible slow bloated itunes software.
Morzer
It’s pretty easy to do that. All you need is some unobtanium.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Morzer:
I think you’re on The List too.
Morzer
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
John “The Mikado” Cole’s little list is expanding faster than his iTunes empire can collapse.
Cogitari Safari
I have the better part of a month’s worth of music on my OS 10.10 with zero issues, though it has mostly accumulated over time. What OS version are you running? Do you have a backup?
Cogitari Safari
@cthulhu:
Somewhat akin to telling someone to start burying their food when their freezer goes on the fritz.
Cogitari Safari
@Eric:
Most of this is simply untrue. As for the file system, it’s true insofar as iTunes organizes by the app and not the OS. It’s simple to organize within iTunes. Windows wonks who want to get into the OS file system for eeeeeeeeverythig will be confused. Imagine someone trying to rearrange something in Windows by fiddling with the DLL. Fun!
Morzer
@Cogitari Safari:
Do you mind? Some of us were eating.
momus
@cat: This is pretty complete advice. The missing music should be on your internal drive. iTunes stopped copying when it ran out if disk space. Change the name of the external drive music folder before you start recopying the music to it. iTunes updates will do random things to your music library. Example: I have half a dozen albums named “Ballads” after one update I found I had one album called “Ballads.” It also decides that a multi-CD album is a collection of different albums and break it up. What iTunes rends asunder, is not easy to restore. I’ve solved my problems by using Adirvana, Its under $100 and produces great sound. My only complaint is that it is slow to load (but then my music folder is about 800G).
Missouri Buckeye
@burnspbesq: Hmm. iTunes handles “The” just fine for me.
If you really care, you can get into the options for a song and give it the “sorting” name, so “The Pretenders” will sort as simply “Pretenders”.
Randall Bott
What pisses me off is every time I run iTunes it updates but never gets any better.
Cogitari Safari
P.S. RadioParadise.com
Absolutely.
Mary Jane Leach
I find that itunes (which I hate) tends to put things in “Unknown Artist” and “Unknown Album” folders, which can be nested in other folders. Try searching for some titles of songs that you ripped, to see if they’ve been stashed in a folder that you then can locate.
RM
@Cogitari Safari:
Oh man, I used to listen to these guys all the time in the 2000s. I didn’t know they were still around.
@Mary Jane Leach:
Yeah, it does that to me all the time. John should totally check to see if they got stuck in there.
trittico
people still use Itunes why exactly????
Cogitari Safari
@trittico:
As it’s not the best music organizer for such devices, you’ll want to avoid iTunes if you use a Zune.