iTunes help

[Sootyzilla]

mine doesn't eject them either. once it's finished burning it just mounts them as an audio cd.

[lynsosaurus]

aye, but there is a button you can click to eject the disc and it won't do it. stupid itunes.

[humblebee]

How can I make iTunes recognise changes to my music folder? It's not recognising anything that's been added to the folder in the few weeks since I last had the misfortune to have to use iTunes. Is there some way you can tell it to rescan the folder (without fucking up all the tags and filenames and subdirectory structure again)?

[Gordon]

Probably. But it's not really supposed to work like that. If you drag the music into iTunes rather than into the music folders, it will all work much better.

[humblebee]

Thanks Gordon. Wouldn't it take longer that way though, if there are a few new albums? I mean you'd have to rummage through your music folder and find all the new ones and drag them on to iTunes. Whereas if you could just make it rescan your music folder, click, that's one command and you can leave the puter to get on with it.

[frogblast]

Thanks Gordon. Wouldn't it take longer that way though, if there are a few new albums? I mean you'd have to rummage through your music folder and find all the new ones and drag them on to iTunes. Whereas if you could just make it rescan your music folder, click, that's one command and you can leave the puter to get on with it.

if you just drag the whole itunes music folder onto iTunes i *think* it will just add the new stuff (at least that's what the mac os x version seems to do on my machine). but don't blame me if you suddenly get duplicate entries of everything!

however i'm fairly certain that if this does work you will end up with two copies of some of the files - probably depends if you have it set to copy files into the itunes folder and to keep the itunes folder organised and if the existing folder names mach the tags of the mp3s

this is always one of the biggest criticisms of itunes - that it doesn't have the ability to monitor folders for new files being added, and to automatically add those files to the itunes library. personally i don't have much problem with just dragging new files onto itunes. the key to using itunes without getting really angry at it is to let it manage the music files for you (i'm never sure why some people want to manually manage thousands of files with the file browser - surely the whole point of itunes is that is does all that for you)

(any mod feel like correcting the title of this thread? it's 'iTunes', not 'I-Tunes'.
Yours Faithfully, your resident mac using pedant.)

[humblebee]

this is always one of the biggest criticisms of itunes - that it doesn't have the ability to monitor folders for new files being added, and to automatically add those files to the itunes library. personally i don't have much problem with just dragging new files onto itunes. the key to using itunes without getting really angry at it is to let it manage the music files for you (i'm never sure why some people want to manually manage thousands of files with the file browser - surely the whole point of itunes is that is does all that for you)

I wouldn't have a problem with iTunes doing all that for me if it wasn't completely bloody useless at it!

[mkgleeds]

I have shiny new computer and now need to get 60gb of ITunes stuff across from the old one.

I started by installing ITunes on new PC, i then copied some files across from old PC with a memory stick. Problems are;
1) Its going to take about 50 goes to do this and i'm sure i'll miss some which will be a pain to reconcile
2) It doesn't pull across all the info (Playcount / Rating etc) - which being a bit anal i want it to do.

So do i just get a memory stick with more capacity or is there a better way. Its been suggested i try to connect the 2 PCs by a network but i cant do that.

[Gordon]

I have shiny new computer and now need to get 60gb of ITunes stuff across from the old one.

I started by installing ITunes on new PC, i then copied some files across from old PC with a memory stick. Problems are;
1) Its going to take about 50 goes to do this and i'm sure i'll miss some which will be a pain to reconcile
2) It doesn't pull across all the info (Playcount / Rating etc) - which being a bit anal i want it to do.

So do i just get a memory stick with more capacity or is there a better way. Its been suggested i try to connect the 2 PCs by a network but i cant do that.

If you transfer the whole itunes directory across with the xml files it should keep the playcounts etc.

[mkgleeds]

I have shiny new computer and now need to get 60gb of ITunes stuff across from the old one.

I started by installing ITunes on new PC, i then copied some files across from old PC with a memory stick. Problems are;
1) Its going to take about 50 goes to do this and i'm sure i'll miss some which will be a pain to reconcile
2) It doesn't pull across all the info (Playcount / Rating etc) - which being a bit anal i want it to do.

So do i just get a memory stick with more capacity or is there a better way. Its been suggested i try to connect the 2 PCs by a network but i cant do that.

If you transfer the whole itunes directory across with the xml files it should keep the playcounts etc.

That so nearly worked.
I copied all the files across, which took a while as it took about 1 hour per GB on the old PC to copy to memory stick and 1 min per GB to put on new one.
I then copied across and replaced the library files. All the playcounts and playlists appeared. I was very happy and went to play a song but ITunes on the new PC cannot locate it. Same for all the others. I can locate a song as i want to play it but obviously dont want to do this 18000 times.
I tried reimporting all songs to ITunes but just got the 18000 songs added at zero playcount.

I'm guessing its something to do with one PC being XP and the other Vista and the music being stored in a different place.

[Gordon]

There's almost definitely a way to sort it, but short of coming round to your house, not sure what I can advise. It may be down to the relative directory locations (i.e. if everything was in the same place in relation to the itunes directory and xml files, I'd be surprised if it wouldn't work) and I've moved from PC to Mac.

[Murray]

Aaaaarghhh! I'm so frustrated!

I have spent many many hours putting songs together in to an Itunes playlist and then creating new playlists from them each of 24ish songs totalling about 70 - 75 minutes. Now I'm trying to burn them on to disc, and I have a bunch of ruined CD-Rs as I keep getting this error message:

The attempt to burn a disc failed. An unknown error occurred (4450)

I read up online about here - http://godkillzyou.wordpress.com/2007/0 ... rror-4450/ and in other places, but there doesn't seem to be a 'cure'. I've followed some of the ideas such as reducing the burn time from as fast as possible to 16x, and this gave me one disc OK, but now it's doing it again. The really annoying thing is, it will record the first 4 or 5 songs fine, and then it just stops and spits the disc out.

I need to burn lots of CDs over the next few weeks, so any help gratefully received.

Thanks.

[Gordon]

I would guess it's the drive.

[Tomb]

Try another burning package first but I think Gordon may be correct that the drive is at fault. Luckily CD burners are cheap these days!

CDBurnerXP is a good choice. It can burn playlists from m3u or wpl formats. This may help for exporting your itunes playlists.

[tonieee]

You could try burning them at an even slower speed? I usually burn cds at 4x (because I'm superstitious about such things and I don't burn cds often enough for it to matter that it takes a bit longer).

[Murray]

Thanks for the suggestions. I've been burning at 4x this afternoon (great minds, Tonieee!) and so far 3 out of 3 have been fine. Touch wood and all that, I'll manage to get everything done without having to buy a new laptop!

[leon]

A few months ago something went wrong with my iTunes library and it was completely empty. Most of the songs were still on my hard drive but I had to drag them all back into itunes again. For some reason I now have loads of stuff thats on there twice, some stuff that HAS disappeared, and stuff that doesn't have the correct info with the song. I also have 9 copies of Secret Secret by Pushy Parents and have found stuff on there I have no recollection of ever adding, along with a lot of songs placed in 'Unknown Artist' or 'Unknown Album' folders on my hard drive despite the details showing in itunes. Basically its a mess.

So anyway, my question is is there a piece of software that will sort it out for me or at least clear all the duplicates or do I have to do it manually?

[Gordon]

Something like this?

http://www.tuneupmedia.com/

Usually there are backups of your library.xml file as well, which may help.

[leon]

That looks just the ticket Gordon, thanks.