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Geek Culture / wtf did itunes just do to my machine?

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Phaelax
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 02:49
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Well, I used to be a big iTunes fan. I find myself suddenly wanting to finish my iTunes clone real soon now. It just totally screwed up my entire collection, I'm talking over 50k songs! Many of the songs were renamed and moved into different folders, meaning when I want to play a song I have no idea which file it is anymore. The majority of the ID3 TAG data is empty in the files, so no chance of reimporting into anything. And I've recently found out that several files are corrupted and will no longer play in anything.

My music drive is completely F***ED!!!

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_Nemesis_
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 03:13
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Wow, sounds nasty. If they've not got DRM crap, you might be able to get away with using something like MusicBrainz, which analyses your collection based on length, and a number of other factors, to determine what track it is and writes ID3 tags from that.

At least I'm not the only one to have had problems with iTunes / Quicktime. Last time I installed Quicktime, it messed up all my codecs - which it shouldn't do, as it shouldn't install any than it's own. I haven't used iTunes since, because it obviously comes with Quicktime which I'm not in too much of a hurry to install again.

Good luck with sorting out your collection again though, 50k is a lot of songs to lose, talking well in excess of 200-250gb there :/
Do you know how it managed to get in that state, or did you just start iTunes to see it like that?

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Dave J
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 07:00
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How the hell do you have so many songs anyway? Do you even like all of them? I'm not even sure I've heard 50,000 different songs in my entire life!


"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers."
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Agent Dink
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 08:21
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50,000 songs at an average of 3.5 minutes each equals 2916 hours of music which equals 121.5 days. Wow... 1/3 of a years worth of music, and you'll never repeat a song! If you like that many songs, thats incredible lol.

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Jeku
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 08:34
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When you install iTunes it asks you if you'd like it to manage your files automatically--- you probably selected Yes (the default option I believe) without even reading or thinking about it.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 10:46
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I knew about that option and selected it on purpose because that's how I originally had it. Never caused me problems before.

A small group of friends and I collected all our music together, one of which used to work at a cd shop and the owner often paid him in store credit; which basically meant he got tons of cds. So none of it is even downloaded music. One of them should have a backup of all the files, I may just delete everything and transfer them back over.

I'll try this MusicBrainz Picard thingy.


I'm starting to question whether it was really iTunes or not. I just started it one day and noticed. But I have a separate mp3 folder of random misc. songs that I'm pretty sure I never imported into iTunes and they're all screwed as well. I couldn't even begin to imagine how long it'd take to repair all this by hand.


On the bright side, all the Modern English seems to have remained intact. Good thing I'm an 80's music fan!

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Chris Franklin
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 10:54
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strange a ton of my metallica , Kaiser chiefs, Guns n' Roses music has all gone as well and i only listened to that once in itunes

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Phaelax
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 11:09
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MusicBrainz didn't fix a friggin thing, useless. All it did was fill in missing tag info for the already incorrectly labeled songs. Many of the songs I've noticed aren't just the wrong song, but not even complete songs. It's like it'll start in the middle of one song and finish while starting another.

I remember when I installed iTunes7 in Vista and imported the music. I forget exactly what it said, but it was doing some kind of audio analysis during the import. It did take several hours, I'm now wondering if maybe it actually overwrote all the files and got it way way wrong.

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Chris Franklin
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 13:02
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Quote: "I remember when I installed iTunes7 in Vista and imported the music. I forget exactly what it said, but it was doing some kind of audio analysis during the import. It did take several hours, I'm now wondering if maybe it actually overwrote all the files and got it way way wrong."


Itunes 7 on xp here must be that was fine in earlier versions...

*goes back to re adding Arch enemy into itunes*

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Manic
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 13:58
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use winamp

I don't have a sig, live with it.
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Chris Franklin
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 15:35
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Quote: "use winamp
"

Doesn't work proper, any tracks with a number at the start in the libary it just keeps swaping around to each track with the same number
Which get's very very annoying

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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 15:45
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I use mp3nity - it tried to "intelligently" lookup album data over the net with Amazon and then, failing that, FeeDB. It embeds album art into the MP3 too. I quite like it - I spent ages looking for a decent one and ended up using that. Not sure you'd wanna spend weeks going through your collection by hand though.

That really sucks though....

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Phaelax
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Posted: 20th Nov 2006 01:17
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i've always hated winamp, mainly because it never worked right for years. Plus, its navigation system is hardly adequate for a library of my size. (unless they've made changes im unaware of)

I suppose there's always songbird, pfft hahahaa. Last time I used it (first release) it ran slower than itunes. I think I'll check it out again, give it a fair chance since its been a year.

FreeDB has a new owner now. For awhile, there was worries about it going offline because of GraceNote or RIAA or something like that.

I looked at a screenshot of mp3nity, the interface looks somewhat excessive.

I just talked to my friend, we're gonna redo the harddrive tonight.

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indi
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Posted: 20th Nov 2006 03:20
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I use winamp as well on a pc.
Its the fastest in regards to managing mammoth amounts of files.
some skins are amazing, the web tv and web radio are ok but some content is quite rude.

I Tunes has a preference to allow it to manage your music in the settings.

You should deactivate that or you will end up with a hard drive with two music folders and double the content of the same thing, extra folders for each artist and album.

If I tunes has doen this to your music, just search that folder only for *.mp3 etc. and this will alloe you to grab them all out of the folders at once to another folder.

If that feature is off and you have established music file setup and a file sharing connection between your mac and pc,
I tunes will happily play it over the network without taking a copy and stuffing the file.

btw "its what you<-- did to your computer"

if you upgraded from a very early version without studying new features, there at least should be a sign in the program saying wait! if your new to this version etc. catching the silly mistake.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 20th Nov 2006 12:20 Edited at: 20th Nov 2006 12:22
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Why do people insist on the problem is my fault as if I've never used a computer before? I know very well how iTunes is suppose to work and have been using it for several years. I allow iTunes to manage the folders so when I change TAG info (mainly on my own songs) it keeps it organized and makes it easier for me to find in the file explorer.


We backed up the other files I had on the drive to a Mac, formatted the drive using Mac to FAT32, and recopied the files. For all the files that were backed up, the initial folder names remain the same, but all the subfolders and files have corrupted names and are inaccessable. As for the mp3 files, every artist starting with 'T' is corrupted as well. Every artist after 'T' isn't even listed, even though the folders appeared fine on Mac as though they had been copied successfully. What's even stranger is that when I select all the corrupted artist folders and get the file info, it displays 2.56TB on disk! Not giga, tera! It's a 200GB harddrive, Windows says I've used 179GB total of the drive, which sounds about right. Properties of the music folder containing all the mp3s claims 260GB, while selecting only the corrupted files within the music folder states the 2.56TB.

Most might think, big deal you lost some music. The data I had backed up included most of my original computer files from the 90's, including old Pascal/QB files and misc artworks, among other files. I'm hoping my friend hasn't cleared his trashcan yet.

And its after 6am, I have class in less than 2 hours which includes a law exam. I'm in a very unstable mood.

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