Will I lose my music?

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wgb113

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I am in the process of ripping my 600+ CD collection using CDex to an external hardrive to be used with iTunes and my 80GB iPod.

I rip the CD's during the week and sync it with the iPod each weekend. This weekend before the sync I decided I'd try to clean up the music folder on the harddrive that iTunes points to. I wasn't happy with the way it was organizing my music:

"Beatles" - 3 albums
"Beatles, The" - 7 albums
"The Beatles" - 3 albums

In the example above I'd cut and paste the 3 albums in "Beatles" and 3 albums in "The Beatles" to "Beatles, The".

I deleted my iTunes Library in iTunes and reloaded the re-organized files from the hard drive folder. I didn't realize that you had to unselect the option for iTunes to keep your music file organized so it went and undid everything just did on the hard drive. Problem is, I lost 47 albums. I searched my entire PC and the external drive and couldn't find them anywhere.

At this point I didn't want to go any further so I did not sync my iPod. Those 47 albums are still on my iPod. I realize there are 3rd party utilities to get them back to my PC but will it work and the next time I sync my iPod will I lose anything else?

Bill
 

Essin

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wgb113 said:
I wasn't happy with the way it was organizing my music:
"Beatles" - 3 albums
"Beatles, The" - 7 albums
"The Beatles" - 3 albums
In the example above I'd cut and paste the 3 albums in "Beatles" and 3 albums in "The Beatles" to "Beatles, The".l
You'll find that you can leave the artist name as "The Beatles" and they'll be sorted under "B". (This is of you have a US/UK operating system).
wgb113 said:
I deleted my iTunes Library in iTunes and reloaded the re-organized files from the hard drive folder.
You could have done the organization much easier from within iTunes. Set iTunes to "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" and renaming Artists/Albums will rename the corresponding disk folder.
 

wgb113

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You could have done the organization much easier from within iTunes. Set iTunes to "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" and renaming Artists/Albums will rename the corresponding disk folder.
If I do this will it screw up anything on my iPod the next time I sync it?

Bill
 

studogvetmed

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If you are missing songs from both the hard drive and iTunes, you will lose them from the iPod the next time you sync. You'll want to make sure you get them back into iTunes before you sync your iPod again.

If the "missing" albums are still in iTunes, but just missing from the hard drive, you will likely see an exclamation point next to them in iTunes. If you sync your iPod, it won't delete these songs, but complain it can't find them.

When it comes to syncing, this is the key. What is in iTunes goes on the iPod, what isn't in iTunes, leaves the iPod. This is for "Sync all playlists and songs automatically", if you decide to set up "Sync selected playlists only" whatever playlists you check go to the iPod, anything not in the playlists leave the iPod.

There are a couple other sync settings, the video and podcast tabs that will remove things from the iPod, but they will stay in iTunes (unless you have removed them from iTunes yourself) (i.e. sync unwatched videos, sync the 5 most recent podcasts), etc. If you have been syncing videos, playlists, etc and your turn off syncing in those tabs, it doesn't leave things on the iPod, it removes them.

If you change to manual mode over all. It leaves everything intact on your iPod.


So before you sync, make sure what is in iTunes matches what is in your iPod.

iPodrip has a free 10 session trial. It's a great program for moving stuff from iPod->computer. If on windows, use ctrl-alt while connecting your iPod to temporarily disable autosync (hold down during entire connection process until you see the iPod in the source column. This is a single time thing, you'll have to repeat each time you connect your iPod, unless you change to manual mode).

Your problem with iTunes organization points towards inconsistency in your tags. You like have some beatles tags as "Beatles", some tagged as "The Beatles" and some as "Beatles, The" I bet if you look at your iPod you'll find at least two, if not three instances of the Beatles on your iPod. You are welcome to turn off iTunes music organization, but you'll want to fix the tags all the same. The automatic iTunes folder organization is based off the ID3 tags, so it shows that you'll have things spread across some different tags, as iTunes and the iPod will recognize each version of the Beatles as distinctly different.

Good luck. I hope this helps you out.
 

wgb113

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Thanks Stu! I'll check out the iPodrip when I get home.

The weird part is the missing albums are all from artists that I didn't "consolidate" like in the Beatles' example above. Bands like Aerosmith, Air, Arctic Monkeys just disappeared. I worry that this might happen again for some reason.

Bill
 

studogvetmed

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The missing albums is certainly a concern... I can't tell you why it decided to say goodbye to these from your hard drive. iTunes won't delete songs from your hard drive, unless you tell it to. I can't explain this phenominom to you. not to through the blame on you and away from iTunes (iTunes can be mucked up some days), but could you have inadvertantly deleted them during your moving stuff around in the iTunes folder?

Note that once you add a song to iTunes, moving it in the iTunes folder breaks the link and you'll have to have iTunes refind the song on the hard drive. This is regardless of if you have folder organization turned on. If you have organization turned off, you want the file on the hard drive where you want it to stay before you add the file to iTunes.
 

wgb113

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After the initial "reorganization" by me on my hard drive I deleted all of the files in iTunes. I was given two prompts, the second one of which asked whether I wanted to move the deleted files to the Recycle Bin or save a copy in the iTunes folder (or something to that effect.) The first time I chose to move the files to the recycle bin where I found and restored 98% of them back to their original external hard drive folders. 47 of the nearly 400 CD's went missing and I'm guessing that when it happened. What I can't figure out is where did they go? I never chose to empty the recycle bin yet when I search everywhere they're nowhere to be found.

I'm going to leave the songs poorly organized as they are now. When I ripped my collection using Windows Media Player as WMA files they were all organized correctly. I guess CDex is using a different database to gather info from? I'll put iTunes into manual mode and try grabbing the missing albums off of my iPod using iPodrip.

Does iPodRip copy the files from the iPod to wherever you want or only to iTunes?

Rather than updating tags I may just end up creating playlists by artist...

Bill
 
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bwh79

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wgb113 said:
Rather than updating tags I may just end up creating playlists by artist...

Bill
See, the problem I have with this is that it's so frickin' easy to update your tags. If you're already selecting all your tracks by "Beatles", "The Beatles", and "Beatles, The", to dump them in a playlist, then why is it that much harder to, while you've got them all selected, right-click "Get Info", and make them all say "The Beatles"?

If you change a tag in iTunes, the file gets renamed (if you changed the name of the track). The tag information embedded in the file gets updated to reflect the change that you've made, and if the artist or album information has been changed the file will be moved into a new folder/subfolder to match the new artist and/or album.

Some people make a big deal out of getting their files all named and sorted properly, and then they either have to put up with ugly tags or, if they let iTunes organize their files, have all their work undone when the files get "fixed" to match the tags. Also, as you have seen, if you change the filename and/or location of a file that's already been imported, then iTunes will lose track of it (and the tags still won't be updated, whereas if you had simply updated the tags instead, then iTunes will save the tag info, move/rename the file as appropriate, and still be able to find the file when it's looking for it). If you simply expend the time and effort to get your tags all neatly organized instead, then iTunes will do the file management for you.
 
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wgb113

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It's the expected time it will take that is daunting to me. With @ 600 albums it's taking me almost two months to re-rip all of my music. To then spend more time editing tags for each song that's incorrect is not appealing. Windows Media Player (or their CD database) was much smarter.

When I initially loaded iTunes onto my PC (before I had my iPod) I let it convert my WMZ files to AAC and it's organization was a complete disaster. How hard would it be to have one CD database that simply used the album-code tied to every release to grab the correct information?

Bill
 

studogvetmed

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I always take great care to make sure the tags on Cds are exactly as I want them before I click the import button. I've never used other tagging software that queries databases so I can't speak to their accuracy verusus others, but in my experience with iTunes, I have to change Genre more than anything. I also use proper grammer in titles, so I'm always fixing capitilization before ripping. Seldom is the artist or album not the way I want it (except for two disk sets and albums with featuring artists). I just take the time to edit the CD information before I rip, which is easy to do in iTunes. Click the CD and make the changes there, click okay, then import.

When it comes to changing album or artist, genre or other global tags, it's not so daunting a task if you select multiple files at once.

The way iTunes organizes the hard drive is not for everyone. For me I don't give a rip what the files look like on my hard drive. I don't have to access the files there, I go through iTunes, so for me it's how the tags look that is most important.

If you choose to organize the hard drive yourself this is your perogative, but note that moving song files from a folder such as Beatles, The to the correct folder does not change the tags in iTunes, you'll still need to fix the tags, so you'll have a doublel wammy on organization.

Something to think about. When it comes to iTunes, and the iPod, it's the tags that it cares about the most.

Good luck.
 

wgb113

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So I should be able to, in iTunes, highlight:

"Beatles"
"The Beatles"

and with one correction to "Beatles, The" change them all?

Bill
 

Essin

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wgb113 said:
So I should be able to, in iTunes, highlight:

"Beatles"
"The Beatles"

and with one correction to "Beatles, The" change them all?

Bill
No. Set all to "The Beatles". See above.
 

Essin

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wgb113 said:
... To then spend more time editing tags for each song that's incorrect is not appealing.
But you never edit EACH SONG (unless the song title happens to be wrong). You'll most often edit tags by the album-full, or even artist-vise.
So to correct, say, 400 Kinks songs from "Kinks" to "The Kinks" takes about 30 seconds.
 

wgb113

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Well that is something that I did not know. I will edit the tags in iTunes in that case.

Now, ideally I would set it to be displayed as "The Beatles" but filed under "B" rather than "T".

Bill
 

Essin

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wgb113 said:
Now, ideally I would set it to be displayed as "The Beatles" but filed under "B" rather than "T".

Bill
You'll find that when you bring up the Browser (ctrl-B) "The Beatles" will be sorted under "B", conveniently close to "The Band" :)
 

wgb113

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Well in that respect she's much smarter than my Dell DJ!

I confess that I haven't sat down and bounced around iTunes much yet. My priority is to get my collection re-ripped. Today we're starting off with Sloan and ending with Stereophonics.

Bill
 
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