iTunes woes

July 17, 2008 10:48 AM

After the recent iTunes upgrade, iTunes no longer plays the MP3s for Radiohead's In Rainbows.

Nothing happens when I try to play any of the songs, and the play count is not increased (unlike other problems I've had with iTunes not playing songs). At first I thought iTunes had just lost the artwork like it does with so many files because the album art area says "Album Artwork Not Modifiable." These are the original MP3 files downloaded from the Radiohead website when they were released last year. I added album artwork at that time, and had been playing them regularly since then. The files are not set to read-only, and they still play in other players (QuickTime, WMP Classic). I have iTunes set to manage my library for me. When I try to add the MP3s again from a backup location, they are not imported. This is iTunes 7.7.0.43 on Windows Vista.

posted by stopgap to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Check the file extensions. When I downloaded In Rainbows, for whatever reason, the extension was .MP3 (note the caps), which caused my iPod Nano to crash every time it tried to play them, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was causing the problem. Just change them to .mp3 and give it a go.
posted by sinfony at 11:24 AM on July 17

Same thing happened to me, and what turned out to be the problem was the ID3 tag. I converted them to a lower version, and then they worked just fine. You should be able to do this from within iTunes.
posted by Weebot at 12:40 PM on July 17

And if iTunes can't/won't edit the tags, there's always MP3tag, which will do the job just fine.
posted by sinfony at 2:26 PM on July 17

I replaced the files in the iTunes Music folder with the originals, renamed to be what iTunes would expect. I thought changing to lowercase .mp3 had made a difference, but I see iTunes has renamed the extension back to .MP3 because that what it had in the library file. Anyway, the files play properly again now and I didn't lose my play count data. Simply renaming the files with lowercase .mp3 extension and changing the ID3 tag version didn't seem to work.
posted by stopgap at 2:38 PM on July 17