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I'm not the OP, but in 2003 iTunes was the single biggest drawback to switching to the Mac, for me. I had a fairly large collection of MP3s at the time -- mayb
by randallsquared 14y ago
I'm not the OP, but in 2003 iTunes was the single biggest drawback to switching to the Mac, for me. I had a fairly large collection of MP3s at the time -- maybe a coupla thousand -- and a bunch of versions of the same song in some cases (an album version, a radio version, live at here, live at there), and it was all neatly categorized in the filesystem, band/album/name, when I switched from Gentoo to OS X. I freely admit I should have had a backup.
When I "tried" iTunes, there was an option for it to rename all your files (I don't remember whether it was the default or if I stumbled on it), but what I did NOT expect was that all my carefully named folders and files would be lumped into "Unknown Artist"/"Unknown Album"/"Unknown Track NNN".mp3, while my old files were all carefully removed.
My MP3 collection literally never recovered. I could choose to play the few hundred tracks that had happened to have good ID3 information, but all the tracks I'd ripped myself were essentially randomized. I also never found an ID3 creator that could successfully differentiate the various versions of songs I had, though I stopped trying around 2006 or 2007, and now I don't bother buying music any more -- I just listen to Pandora.
- Gring 14y agoWhy didn't you do a backup before using such a risky feature, or use the feature on a copy of your original files?
- Mavrik 14y agoBecause you don't really expect a music player to destroy your collection without as much as a warning.
- alexchamberlain 14y agoThis is Apple we're talking about!
- randallsquared 14y agoI should have had a backup in any case, but I didn't actually know I was "using such a risky feature", to be clear. It was quite a while before I understood why my tracks in iTunes had been replaced by the Unknowns, and "iTunes moved rather than copied all my files" was not my first assumption.
- gcr 14y agoMusicBrainz to the rescue! http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard Harness the power of machine learning to identify your songs by what they sound like! Take control of your sprawling library with folder names that YOU define! Re-embed missing ID3 information to that mystery music! Sure, it probably won't catch your live/album/recording distinctions, but I've had pretty good success rates with it. I think there's a port to Mac OSX somewhere.