How to use iTunes library?

December 27, 2005 5:26 PM

iTunes help - Windows version, am confused as to how the library works.

Ok, sigh - I have been using mp3's myself for years, but this was a gift for my mother-in-law. She wants it for audiobooks, and we have ripped about 30GB to date.

However, few audiobooks are recognized by our ripping software, and therefore no MP3 tags are added. This is no issue for my crappy Lexar player, I simply drag'n'drop the folders to the player and boom - no issues.

However, am I correct in assuming that iTunes ONLY indexes/accesses the library by tags, and not filenames?

posted by jkaczor to computers & internet (8 answers total)

Sure, but any decent tagging program should be able to re-tag based on the filename(s) - search AxMe for examples of such prorgams.

Doesn't this make more sense than relying on the user to arbitrarily organize files based on filenames and directory structures only? How would you do ad-hoc playlists by genre/year range/rating/.. otherwise?
posted by kcm at 5:28 PM on December 27, 2005

Thx - I will take a look for re-tagging software.

As for "ad-hoc" - not really; an audiobook is usually 'n' hours in length (Harry Potter - Goblet of Fire was on 17 CD's...), you generally listen in exact track order. Each track may be a chapter, and up to 15 minutes in length.

Of course, you may pause, jump to a track where you last left things, but after that point - listening is linear.

As to rating? You wouldn't rate individual files - genre might be handy.

So, filename consists of "Author - Title - Track # - Disc #" and organized into folders based on author/title.
posted by jkaczor at 5:52 PM on December 27, 2005

(hmmm, or was it Lord of The Rings that was 17 CD's, I forget - with 4 machines ripping away, you do tend to loose track.)
posted by jkaczor at 5:53 PM on December 27, 2005

MP3Tag v2.22 is what I use on Windows XP for messing with tags. I'm sure there is a newer version out though.
posted by parallax7d at 6:11 PM on December 27, 2005

Does iTunes not recognize the audiobooks if you rip them there? I've yet to run into any CD that iTunes/GraceNote have been unable to identify.

You can always manually enter in the ID3 tags using iTunes. Select your track(s), select File > Get Info and input the relavent information.
posted by lunarboy at 7:13 PM on December 27, 2005

I'm not sure how well it works on audio books...but musicbrainz will read the audio fingerprint of files and tag (generally) correct.

musicbrainz.org

Two different taggers can browse through you itunes DB.
posted by filmgeek at 7:16 PM on December 27, 2005

You might want to rip audiobooks in iTunes itself as AAC format, rather than to MP3. This way, you will be able to bookmark the files on the iPod. See Importing Audio CD audiobooks into iTunes for details.
posted by andrewraff at 7:32 PM on December 27, 2005

am I correct in assuming that iTunes ONLY indexes/accesses the library by tags, and not filenames?

No, you're not.

I'm not sure what you think iTunes does with tracks which have no tags, but you appear to think it ignores them completely? That would be insane.

If there are no tags, then the filename is used as the title and pretty much everything else ends up blank, except machine-readable stuff like filesize.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 2:13 PM on December 28, 2005