iTunes issues

[Horrgakx]

I'm really not a fan of Apple software and iTunes is the embodiment of this.

Most of my albums have come from sources where the metadata isn't available so straight away iTunes shrugs its shoulders at these tracks. I tried the Tuneup iTunes plugin which helped some tracks but not all.

I keep my MP3's arranged by individual directory which makes it nice & easy to find what I want to play on WinAmp. But of course I have to use iTunes to put tracks on my iPhone.

Among some other issues I'm constantly seeing iTunes treating individual tracks as an individual album. Any ideas here please?

 

[Spinal]

I had a very similar problem to you. You can manually select all the items in an album in iTunes, then right click and choose edit info, then tick the "compilation" button. This is a pain though.

Have a look at these two bits of software, both available free:

MusicBrainz Picard
TuneSleeve

First pass your tracks through picard; this will fill in all the metadata from various sources and put them in a format that iTunes will like. It'll even do the folders for you if you wish.

Second, pass them through tunesleeve, which will add the album art.

M.

 

[Horrgakx]

Excellent thanks.
So will these update iTunes or is it a per-MP3-outside-of-iTunes only?

 

[Spinal]

TuneSleeve will update iTunes for you (and I've found out it's not free anymore... at least, not legally).

Picard is an out-of-itunes MP3 tool. What you can do is:
1. Close iTunes (including iTunes helper. You'll need to CTRL+ALT+Del to do this in windows)
2. Point picard towards your itunes library folder, get it to do it's magic
3. Open iTunes again, select File>Add Folder to Library and then select the iTunes folder. For once, it's reasonably intelligent and it won't duplicate all your tracks. Instead, it'll just update all the file names. That said, this isn't always 100% - so if you don't mind losing your playcounts, just delete your library file (not the actual folder! Just the index file. I'll get you the name if you wish once I get home) and get itunes to rescan.