New Look I Tunes

I'll have to try it again tonight...it did not work for me yesterday

 

Thanks

 

How was iTunes responsible for your lost music? It seems impossible since iTunes doesn't actually store any music; it simply links to files stored on your drive.

 

ios 8.1 out.

 

It seems that this is something that people do believe, occurs - like I did once. This might be a bit long-winded but it could explain something...

A friend would be continually copying files from drive to drive and also changing his mind as to whether he liked Winamp or iTunes best; whatever file format/codec he has set Winamp to, it would convert the files each time he swapped between the software and that was a number of times. I have a feeling that he was changing settings on it not knowing one from another. He swore blind that iTunes was losing dozens of his albums at a time (as I remember 50 or so one time) and countless single tracks - leaving sometimes a one-song album. When I went to buy a portable music player, I decided against an iPod because I didn't want to use iTunes out of fear! I even said to the shop assistant that I didn't want to lose music and he actually said to me something very similar to "Yes, that IS the problem with them." Hmm... I wasn't very clued-up as to how these things worked back then and when I started to take a real interest, this friend loaned me his one of his external hard-drives that he was using for backup. I discovered multiple duplicates of a good chunk of the music on there, in a few different formats and sometimes I'd see an mp3 in up to 3 different bit-rates. Folders had slipped inside other folders. He was sitting on the machine all night, falling asleep sometimes and suffered from insomnia in phases as well - being awake for two full days and just basically falling unconscious. I stood there once and saw him drop a folder somewhere that it should not have gone and that gave me the answer. I spent weeks sorting through everything - the 'extra' songs took at least 100 gig up that it shouldn't have and it was a 350 or 500 gig drive with other stuff on. I found the same with a lot of his music DVDs he had ripped; files of all types and sizes and hundreds of them. That drive went from almost full to well over half empty.

Since then, I've used a couple of iPods and use iTunes all the time - never knowingly lost a single song in over 5 years.

 

Just go the the artwork tab and select "paste" from the edit menu: whatever image is in the clipboard will be pasted.

 

The problem with that I think is that if you ever transfer your music to any other filing system or media manager it won't recognize the artwork.
In other words "Get Album Artwork" does not embed the artwork in the file itself.

 

I have a friend who kept all his music on an external drive...I kept warning him this was not wise as iTunes should probably be looking at the computer hard drive. Once the drive failed, he "lost" all his music. Now he keeps the library on the main hard drive and uses an external drive for back-up.

 

Yeah, lots of artwork in their database is incorrect and/or missing

 

I considered keeping all my music just on an external (or two) but realised this could cause problems. I'm sure you can configure it to do so; but it's not necessary for me to do so because I have plenty of space anyway. I'd not advise someone to do it as you only have to move one folder and... bam!

 

Keeping your music on an external drive isn't a big deal. You just need to tell iTunes where your library is located. Backing up your drive whether it is the main HD or an external drive should be a given.

Anyone with a sizable library will outgrow the main drive at some point.

As far as "losing" songs, if you just keep all the files in the main library folder and check the keep library organized option in the iTunes preferences. That ensures that the folder structure will always be tidy based on the artist and album tags in the metadata.

 

Mac OSX Yosemite user here. Can't say I love the layout for iTunes 12, maybe got too used to the library+playlists+store+devices pane on the left hand side. Flicking back and forth via icons on the top row to then scroll up and down through playlists, device content and store content seems to be adding in unnecessary complexity to me.

That said, with a 128GB iPhone I'm decanting music back and forth much, much less so the new iTunes layout isn't as much of a pain as it might've been with prior lower capacity devices. The music held on the NAS for home streaming is wholly independent of iTunes and therefore is immune from Apple's latest exercise in rearranging the furniture.

And for everyone complaining about having lost music through computer crashes - backup! This goes for photos, documents, videos and everything else including your music. If it's important, don't have just the once instance of it that might be irretrievably lost if the one device should fail.

 

For some reason, sometimes mine seems to when I manually add an image. Like for example, when I make a 'custom' thumbnail (say I make a compilation) and later on, import the music files onto my Kindle it appears whereas often, the image won't at all.


To add the missing artwork, I do this....

Click on the album (where the image should be.)
Press Control + I, simultaneously.
Then it brings a box up which has a square at the bottom right hand corner for the image (and it's labelled Artwork.)
I drag the image from the desktop onto there, click OK and then the job's done.

 

That's a good point! And I'm continually taking other stuff off mine to make more space, but it's because music is a priority to me and most other things never get a second glance.

It's just the hassle of having less portability with a drive plugged into my laptop. If it was a desktop machine then that would be different and I'd just treat the externals as internal drives (I could leave them in-situ.)

 

Yes, if they're going to be eliminating ANY fields, it'll screw up my entire library!

 

Absolutely correct, although I'd go one further. I've lost photos that I thought were backed up to a second drive as the one I was using packed up and the other didn't have the copies. I would have put money on it before I discovered this, that both drives had identical contents.

They told me in college that -
The original is the original file,
The copy is a copy file and
The second copy is the backup.

Three duplicate files, in total. Not a bad idea.

Then again, IF you can afford that sort of storage space it's fine. I keep things in triplicate now and have done for a while, where possible - about 75% of my files.

 

I've not trusted these upgrades since they changed the format so now you can't easily see each tune's play tally. To do that now you either have to create a standard playlist of selected files or go into the file under 'Get Info' and find out that way. Not as much fun....

(I know, I know...#firstworld problems....but I liked seeing the tally and seeing songs enter & climb my '100 Most Played' chart)

 

You must have a pretty mainstream library. I'm running up against the artwork issues all the time - sometimes wrong covers, sometimes missing altogether (even for some fairly prominent indie-label acts).

 

I have external drive that's holding a lot of my music but I'm afraid it my go on me someday. I was thinking of getting one of these, SanDisk Extreme 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive With Speed Up To 245MB/s-SDCZ80-064G-GAM46
Anybody use these for back up for there music.?

 

Me too, they don't have many of the groups that I like, I have to copy and paste them on.

 

I'd say that at least 50% of my album covers don't appear - and it doesn't matter if they're VERY mainstream or not.

Conversely, I've had a lot appear that I wouldn't expect to; there seems to be no rule to it.

 

This is why I don't use iTunes for artwork and haven't for years. I use an ID3 tag editor, KID3 in my case (both Windows and Mac versions). I rip the album in iTunes, drop one of the tracks from Finder into KID3, and drop in the artwork. That way I KNOW the artwork is embedded and done so correctly (not sure if iTunes still insists on putting album artwork in a separate mystery-filled folder or not.) It's a little more work, but I care about the cover artwork and as mentioned, iTunes so often gets it wrong or uses inferior artwork.

 

Be aware that changing editing album info in Amazon's Music Player deletes ALL tags from the files you are editing. It must function from a database containing all that info rather than what's built into MP3 and other compatible formats. And I don't mean that it alters them, I mean that it strips them out entirely. No Artist info, no Album name, no track numbers, no disc numbers, no genre, no artwork. Nothing. Music Player is TERRIBLE software, among the very worst I have EVER used.

 

64gb seems pretty small. Flash drives are very expensive per gb compared to standard drives. Speed isn't really that important. You won't be writing to it very often.
I have my full itunes library on an external drive and automatically back it up to another drive in case of failure. Hard drives are cheap.

 

What? Just add a play count column to your interface.