Lonewolf Online

iTunes Problems

Saturday 3rd May 2008  

Well, I finally imported all of my MP3 collection into iTunes after a week of tedious configuration and mind numbing re-tagging of over 4000 files. So after all of this work, was it worth it? Well my new iPod Nano now has over 100 albums on it (1300 tracks) and I can now listen to my favourite music where ever I am.

Sharing What I Learned

While tagging, converting and generally taking a long time to use a horrible piece of software to perform what should be an easy task, I learned quite a bit, including how to solve some very annoying problems.

iTunes will not import an MP3 track(s) - Firstly make sure you can play the track(s) using Quicktime player, if you can then iTunes does not like the MP3 header or tags. I used a tool called MP3 Repair Tool and removed the first 1 frame as well as everything after the last frame. iTunes would then import the file and you can set the tags manually.

iTunes will not import an album - As above, MP3 Repair Tool can work in batch mode. You can then use Windows Explorer to batch tag the files with album/artist by selecting the files, right click and select properties. On the summary tab select advanced and give the files album and artist. This will group the files in iTunes where you can further name and tag.

Adding Album art in iTunes - Not as intuitive as Windows Media Player, it took me a while to find how to do this. Select and right click on the files to have art associated with them. Click on Get Details, and drag a jpeg image onto the artwork box. When you click on ok, iTunes will add the artwork to the files. Don’t use a high resolution (I found 100×100 a good size) image as it will be added to each file. Large images will a) take ages to process and b) increase file size and album size meaning less can be stored on iPod.

iTunes splits albums up into separate albums of the same artist/title - You need to make sure that the artist and album are EXACTLY the same for all tracks. Select all the tracks that are within the same album, right click and select Get Info. Make sure that the album/album artist/artist is correct and tick the check boxes next to them. This will tell iTunes to apply these settings to all selected files. If that still does not group them together then select them all, Get Info and change Compilation to Yes and apply the changes. They should now be together on one album.

iTunes takes ages to load - Still waiting to find a fix for this one. Each time I load iTunes it takes around 5 minutes for the program to show, even though I only have around 5000 tracks. I know people with twice this in iTunes which loads instantly.

Got any iTunes or iPod tips to share? Please share by leaving a comment on this post. Thanks!

This post is filed under iPod by Lonewolf at 7:42pm

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