Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with WindowsXP and iTunes

What's up with my music files on my PC?

ishotjr — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:12:02 -0800

What is up with my music files' titles turning into nonsensical four-letter titles? Ok, this is a little long, but it's a weird problem that is hard to describe.

I use iTunes on a (Dell) Windows Vista PC laptop. I noticed this issue probably over a year ago, but was too lazy to do anything about it until now.

Thousands of my music files are in files within "C:\My Music" that are named with F and then a number, F00 thru F49. All of my music was originally in "C:\Users\ishotjr\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music," and some of it still is. Within the F-named folders, the files are named/songs titled in three different ways.
1) Most are with four letters in caps, example: AJOM. They are seemingly random and not acronyms of the real titles. Within this, most, in the artist/album, etc. fields in Windows Explorer, have the correct info. A few have nothing at all in those.
In either case, if I choose to play it in iTunes (by clicking the option within Windows Explorer, where I'm viewing the files), it brings me to the song that is properly titled within iTunes (i.e., AJOM takes me to "Levitate Me" by The Pixies in iTunes).
2) A few of the songs are named with their correct name, but with the track number proceeding it (i.e. 01 Debaser)
3) Even fewer are named completely normally, with just the actual song title.

Another weird twist is that in iTunes itself, there are a handful of files that are actually named with the four letter names. Most of these are all from a Velvet Underground greatest hits compilation, but there are a few that aren't.

There seems to be no pattern as to how I procured the music and what's in these weird files. I did bring most of the music onto my computer from my iPod when I got the computer, but some of it I have purchased since owning this computer. The software I used to bring the songs from the iPod to the computer was some free program that I don't recall the name of and deleted to save hard drive space when I was done using it.

The real kicker is that most of these weirdly-named tracks are NOT duplicates, so I can't just delete them. Most of the time, it's one or two songs from a given album that are named weird and in the F-named folder instead of in the folder with the rest of its album-mates.

It seems that I might be stuck consolidating the 49 "F" folders into one (not so hard, just tedious), then trying to rename the thousands of song backs to their proper names by clicking them through to iTunes and manually entering the name of each song into the file name in Windows, then moving all of the songs to the correct place. It's not necessary to do this to be able to listen to the songs, but it's annoying having my files all over the place, especially when I want to delete entire albums off of my hard drive to make space.

My actual question is two-part:
1) Has anyone ever had this weirdo thing happen to their music files before?
2) Does anyone know a better way to fix it than to do everything manually (which will take for-ev-er)?

How to fix Windows iTunes HD video?

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:30:21 -0800

How do I make iTunes on Windows XP stop stuttering? HD video stutters, as if iTunes either can't feed video fast enough from the hard drive, or can't uncompress it fast enough to display on-screen. It gets worse as the program progresses.

Per Apple's help document, I have enabled DMA on the hard drive and tried toggling DirectX preferences in QuickTime.

I have an ATI All-in-Wonder 600X that I updated the drivers for. It is plugged into an PCI Express 16x slot.

The box is running a Pentium M 2.1 GHz with 2 GB of RAM.

As much as I hate this awful operating system, I'd like to use this Windows XP box to feed HD video. What settings do I enable or hardware do I need to add to reliably play HD video through this box? Thanks for your advice.

How can I load up my iPod from my wife's computer without disrupting her iTunes?

Faint of Butt — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:13:30 -0800

How can I load up my iPod from my wife's computer without disrupting her iTunes? I've got an iPod, and there are songs on it. My computer is currently out of commission, and I'm doing all my day-to-day online business on my wife's computer instead. We're going out of town on Friday, and I want to make sure my iPod is nice and loaded for the trip. The trouble is that my wife also has an iPod, and uses iTunes very heavily. How can I use her computer to load up my iPod, while being absolutely certain that her iPod and her iTunes directories will not be in any way disrupted? I don't care if my iPod gets wiped in the process; I can always refill it. It's her stuff I'm worried about. We're dealing with Windows XP.

PC won't recognize iPod

alona — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 03:03:29 -0800

My PC won't recognize my iPod. What can I do? I've tried everything on the apple website, and I've gone through several metafilter iPod trouble posts. Sadly, none of them seem to apply as in all cases, the problem seemed to be iTunes not recognizing the device, and not the whole computer.

So, I have a dandy iPod video, 30gb. I purchased it in December when I was in North America and I used my brother's laptop to upload songs. I have about 30 songs on there now.
And now I have app. 4GB of songs in my iTunes library at home and no way of getting it onto my iPod.

When I plug my pod in, it charges, but it doesn't even appear as a device in My Computer.

I have a suspicion that this has something to do with the fact that my computer's already recognized my copy of Windows XP as not being genuine.

What can I do to get my computer to recognize my iPod? Help, I'm desperate!

Help me stop the iTunes seziures on Windows XP.

chairface — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 15:59:02 -0800

iTunes 7.X on my Windows box has seizures during the last several seconds of a song. My search fu has failed me. I have a moderate collection of music (18G) on my iTunes setup on Windows XP. During playback on some (but not all) songs, iTunes will lock up my machine for a few seconds during the last 5 seconds of a song. It's maddening.

I just stumbled across one song that has this seizure problem every five seconds for the entire last minute of the track (which is all silence). I have crossfade playback turned off. The track is not marked as part of a gapless album.

My boss has the exact same problem with his iTunes setup. Any idea how I can make the problem go away?

Apologies in advance for asking yet another iTunes question, and thanks in advance for any advice.

How can I unite two different music collections (with some duplicates) for itunes?

stupidsexyFlanders — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 06:13:00 -0800

I have about 73GB worth of music in iTunes. The "my music" folder on my HDD has about 85GB of music in it. I want to identify the music that's NOT in iTunes so I can either delete it, or organize it and import it into iTunes. Advice? I'm using WinXP.

Can I make iTunes recognize an RCA device?

nprigoda — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 08:47:51 -0800

I'd like to change the way Windows XP handles an external device (mp3 player). My RCA Lyra is dealt with as an external hard drive, so that I can only add files to it by copy-pasting (or drag and dropping) but not through the iTunes "export" feature. How do I change how Windows treats this device? I've tried to see if there's anything I can change in the Device Manager, but there don't appear to be any options. Uninstalling and then re-installing the device doesn't help. I am the administrator on the computer, and I have the most recent drivers. Help!