itunes importing into the podcast library instread of the music library

December 2, 2006 5:03 PM

I imported some mp3s into iTunes, searched for them in my music library and couldn't find them. I tried re-importing them: same thing. Finally, I found them in the podcast library. I don't want them there. How does iTunes decide to put a particular mp3 in the podcast library? I can't see any obvious tag that tells it to do this. What can I do to these mp3s to get to to show up in my main library?
posted by grumblebee to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Check the info screen on the tracks. Is the Genre set to podcast?
posted by Good Brain at 5:08 PM on December 2, 2006

No. There was no genre at all. I changed them all to the genre "Pop" but that didn't more them out of the Podcast library. The libraries are a separate classification system from genres.
posted by grumblebee at 5:11 PM on December 2, 2006

Sorry, that was confusing. What I meant was that when I first tried checking Info, there was no genre listed. I THEN changed the genre to Pop. But it doesn't make any difference what genre I insert.
posted by grumblebee at 5:13 PM on December 2, 2006

Some history--iTunes 4 separated podcasts and the main library. Podcasts could be dragged to the main library and would be displayed in the main library. In early versions of iTunes 5 podcasts were changed to appear in both the podcasts section and the main library. This upset quite a few people and current versions of iTunes separate the podcasts and other music and give no option to combine the two. This is very annoying, especially when dealing with music podcasts.

The interweb says iTunes uses the extendible id3v2 tags to store podcast information. If any text in the tags contain "podcast", iTunes will treat it as a podcast. You may be able to fix your problem by converting id3v2 tags to id3v1 tags (which cannot be extended) and reimporting the music. This can be done on Windows using a program such as ID3-TagIT. id3v2 tags need to be completely ignored (iTunes will only read id3v1 tags if id3v2 tags don't exist).
posted by null terminated at 6:57 PM on December 2, 2006

argh, not "ignored"-- "removed"
posted by null terminated at 6:59 PM on December 2, 2006

Note that if you do that you'll lose some info and/or truncate some names. I would search for a better way.
posted by alexei at 9:22 PM on December 2, 2006

You may be able to fix your problem by converting id3v2 tags to id3v1 tags

I can confirm that this worked for me on OS X with Media Rage. I didn't seem to lose any info other than the podcast info, exactly what I wanted to lose.
posted by scottreynen at 9:41 PM on December 2, 2006

iTunes will also convert ID3 tags.
posted by kindall at 11:27 PM on December 2, 2006

a slightly different problem - I have iTunes 6, and I WISH that iTunes separated podcasts and music. anyone know how to do that? (I circumvented the problem by creating a smart playlist that only plays music, but that's not the same). thanks!
posted by barmaljova at 5:46 AM on December 6, 2006