Can I correct track information in iTunes match without downloading

July 24, 2014 5:20 AM

I've migrated all my songs to iTunes Match, because I don't have space on my hard drive. But some of my ripped tracks have weird names, dating back from when I manually ripped the CDs. Is there a way of (semi?)automatically correcting these without having to download my whole library, or go through manually?

Most of the software I've found seems to need the music files, which is reasonable enough, but doesn't help me. I could do it in batches I suppose. But really I want to do it all in one go. So has anyone found an easier way of renaming songs that are in the iTunes cloud?

This is on a Mac, by the way, a laptop.

posted by danteGideon to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

If you go on your Mac (or any computer that is authorized for your iTunes Match), you can right click on any song / album (in the cloud) and choose "get info") and make changes and they SHOULD sync back to iTunes Match. I just tried this and it worked properly (and quickly, too).

By properly, I mean, "I changed it on my Mac and it updated iTunes match that I see on my iPhone".
posted by gregvr at 5:45 AM on July 24, 2014

Oh, sorry, I didn't see that you were asking about (semi?)automatically doing this. I'm pretty sure, although I haven't done it, that any AppleScript based solutions will see the music data even if the actual song file isn't downloaded.
posted by gregvr at 6:02 AM on July 24, 2014

Response by poster: That's no problem. To make it a bit clearer, I know I can go through manually and change them, but there are several hundred. I obviously went through a phase of putting extraneous stuff like bit rates or year in the titles. Almost my entire David Bowie collection suffers from this, for a start. But it's not uniform enough that I can crank out a regular expression. (Not that I'm all that with regular expressions - call myself a programmer...)
posted by danteGideon at 6:56 AM on July 24, 2014

Response by poster: Also! I mainly listen on my phone out and about these days, or I probably would do them one by one. That's most likely how it got there in the first place.
posted by danteGideon at 6:59 AM on July 24, 2014

Best answer: The answer seems to be no. I went with the 'downloading in batches' method.
posted by danteGideon at 12:27 PM on August 23, 2014