Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with itunes

Help!! I can't take the podcast withdrawal.

the luke parker fiasco — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 06:03:42 -0800

Why am I suddenly not able to access the iTunes store from Europe? I created an iTunes store account in the US, which I've been using without incident in Eastern Europe for about a year for downloading podcasts. A few days ago, the connection to the store started timing out, every time. I moved about a week ago, but I had been able to access the store from my new location--both over wireless and PPPoE--up until the time this problem began, so it shouldn't be an issue with the new connection. I've also remained logged in.

How can I regain access? Podcasts are my main news source, and I'm getting twitchy without them ...

How do I keep the aspect ratio from changing when I import a video ripped from DVD by handbrake into itunes on a Mac.

jeffreyclong — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:00:34 -0800

How do I keep the aspect ratio from changing when I import a video ripped from DVD by handbrake into itunes on a Mac. I just ripped a Phish video that I bought into h.264 using handbrake. When I play it in quicktime the aspect ration is correct, 631x480. But when I import it into itunes for some reason it squares the video. I have some episodes of the TV show Daria that I imported where the aspect ratio is kept the way it should be. Does anyone know what's going here? Is there a way to fix it? I can't find any video settings for importing.

Thanks

iPod iTunes music library management

Yorke and Vedder — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:36:45 -0800

Is there a way, (3rd party program, plug in, etc...) that will let me compare my iPod's music library against my iTunes library, (maybe on dual panes?) and visually mark which songs on my iTunes library are not in my iPod and viceversa? Maybe there's a script out there that does this...? I've tried other media managers, (MediaMonkey, Songbird, Winamp, etc...), but none of them offer that feature either.

Any suggestions?

Keeping the same iTunes Library across Boot Camp?

dunkadunc — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:24:29 -0800

iTunesfilter: I'm running Mac OS 10.4 and Windows XP on my Mac Mini using Boot Camp. Thing is, I'd like to keep the two iTunes libraries in sync with each other. The actual music files are kept on an external hard drive, due to the library's size.
I do most of my music management in Mac OS, but I'd like to have the changes I make in OSX show up in Windows, as well. Is there some sort of software/script that will sync the Windows library with the Mac one, periodically?
Thanks in advance!

Recommendation for a new (non-itunes) media player

Carillon — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:56:46 -0800

I need a new media player for music as itunes has finally driven me over the edge. Does anyone have a good windows-based media player to recommend?

Has iTunes responded to your application?

kimdog — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 08:12:21 -0800

Has anyone successfully gotten their music on iTunes without using a distributor like CD Baby? If so, how long did it take? Two months ago my boyfriend started the process of submitting his band's music to iTunes. He filled out the iTunes on-line application and received a confirmation that it had gone through. The language of the e-mail stated that it could be "some time" before he got a response due to volume.

His band had three albums, two of them on a major label, as well as a greatest hits album (he has since regained the rights to all of his music). The albums have been out of print for a long time, but it's popular genre of music, and the band has a pretty decent fan base. Several of his songs have recently been featured on compilations by very well regarded artists.

So after 10 weeks with no word from iTunes, we are wondering if it's worth hanging in there and dealing with iTunes directly, or if we should start looking at distributors like CD Baby that will place the music for a fee. Anyone have relevant experiences they can share about dealing with iTunes directly?

Why does my iPod hate my computer (or vice versa)?

Bromius — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:34:41 -0800

My iPod has recently stopped communicating (almost) entirely with my computer. I'm really at a loss to explain it. So here's the story:

5g 80 gig iPod, and I'm using Windows. I've had this iPod for almost 2 years and have had no serious problems until now. When I plug in the iPod to my USB hub, the computer makes the *donk* noise (albeit in a stuttery way) and gives me the standard "this device can perform faster" message.
Problem is, the iPod doesn't show up in My Computer, or in iTunes. The iPod doesn't even draw a charge through the USB cable. I've tried the 5 Rs (reset the iPod, retried a different port, restarted my computer, reinstalled iTunes, restored iPod) with no success. Even though I couldn't restore the iPod on my own computer, I tried my friend's laptop (with the same USB cable, just in case that was the problem) and the iPod showed up just fine. I restored it and tried it again on mine. Nothing.
Why is the USB message and sound triggered when I plug in the iPod, but nothing else? I've even left it connected overnight, just in case it took a while to synch. Again, nothing. So what could the problem be? Is there anything else I can do? I'm really at my wit's end.

How to best handle my iTunes library?

arniec — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:47:29 -0800

What is the easiest and best way for me to share my large iTunes multimedia library amongst 4 Macs? I have a multimedia library (mostly MP3 files ripped from my personal collection, a few purchased iTunes songs some with DRM somewithout, and one or two movies/TV shows purchased from iTunes) that is approaching 100GB. This is stored currently on a 100GB external hard drive.

My wife and I have 4 computers; we each have a desktop and a laptop. All 4 are authorized on our shared iTunes account for our content.

Currently the library is hooked into my Airport Extreme's USB port. As the router uses little power and is always on, it seemed the best way to share the files across the network. However we have 2 problems:

1) To add this library to a computer takes overnight. It must process all the files on the drive, then cover index, etc. This isn't a problem if it were a one time thing or even once per computer but...

2) When one of us purchases more music, etc. it only appears on one computer at most (if, for example, we make a DRM free purchase at Amazon it shows up on no computers).

As we like to keep our media organized by Artist, Album, Song, we end up having to purge our entire iTunes library and re-add it (taking, again, overnight) to find the few tracks added.

What I want is a simple way to have the library on all 4 computers and when any computer adds a file all computers see it.

Bonus points: 1) If one of us accidentally opens a file like an MP3 sent by e-mail in iTunes and then deletes it, it does not cause a dead link on all computers.

2) Uber bonus points if there is also a way to share these files with my X-Box/PS3/multimedia receiver to play my music in our living room.

Thank you hive mind! Help me see the links I can't see for myself in this conundrum.

Moving Podcasts to the Correct iTunes Container

sjuhawk31 — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:43:46 -0800

How can I move my favorite podcast (which I download manually, because the iTunes feed is a week behind) from the Music Library to the Podcast Library, if for no other reason than it's easier to get to it once I transfer to my iPod? I listen to Smodcast almost religiously. A while back, they stopped putting the newest episode on iTunes the day it came out, switching to a schedule where you have to go to the website to get it on time. I'm fine with that. Problem is, when you download it, it's just a regular ol' MP3 and sits in the iTunes music library. How can I force it to behave otherwise?

Google gives me plenty of ways to move a podcast to the music library, but none to do the other way around. Programs like Lostify let you tag stuff you download from your browser as TV Shows and Movies so they go in the right section, but their FAQ says pretty clearly that they aren't supporting podcast tagging. What's a podcaster to do?

iTunes woes

stopgap — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:48:09 -0800

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.

My ipod needs to be mooing.

By The Grace of God — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:53:29 -0800

UK Ipod Touch 2.0 Update Problem when attempting to purchase - what am I doing wrong? Ipod Touch firmware 1.1.4 with January software update; iTunes version 7.7; macbook with OSX Leopard. I go here and click the buy link, to purchase; I go to the link and click, and firefox pops the choose what application to load in, I choose Itunes, Itunes says accessing itunes store.. and then NOTHING HAPPENS!

w.t.f.??!?!?!

There is a free application that can make my ipod MOO, people. I have been working eighty million hours in a by-election and I am tired and achy and stressed and need a mooing ipod, STAT!

many thanks for your help.

how to favorite podcasts and music in iTunes?

esolo — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 05:57:20 -0800

can you favorite podcasts and albums in iTunes without downloading or buying them? I am an avid podcast listener - I have just recently discovered iTunes, and am overwhelmed in a good way! However, I would like to find a way to favorite specific podcasts without necessarily downloading them or subscribing to them. Is there a way to do that within iTunes? So I am not talking about copying and pasting the information into a separate file, but something more flawless within the program itself.

Where can I get the libretto for Punch & Judy?

Lentrohamsanin — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 05:21:18 -0800

I recently purchased Birtwistle's opera Punch and Judy through the iTunes Music Store. I should have been paying closer attention, but I was disappointed to see that there was no pdf of the libretto included in the download. Looking around online it looks like my options to get it are to buy a copy of the CD set (which I was trying to avoid obviously, hence the download), or buy the full vocal score (which at around £80 isn't really an option). Does anyone know of another option that I'm missing?

[iTunesFilter] Want to fill 160 Gb iPod, but only has tiny teensy hard-drive

XiBe — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:01:17 -0800

How to handle a 160 Gb iPod when the computer only has 30 free Gb? My girlfriend asked for a 160 Gb iPod for her birthday, and I offered her. She wanted a bug iPod because she wanted to have all of her music in there - her older 4 Gb iPod Nano wasn't enough, she constantly had to renew its content.

Thing is, she handles iTunes and therefore her music from her old laptop, where she just doesn't have the disk space to fill up her new iPod. The issue here would be that iTunes requires that you have all your music in it, before you can put in the iPod - and that you then keep the music in iTunes. Given her drive space, she just can't do this.

She does have an external drive, and I advised her to put all of her music in there, and let iTunes handle her music from there, but she doesn't really want to carry around her ex-drive when on vacation, for instance.

Does anyone around you had to deal with this kind of situation? Any advice could be pretty useful...

Thanks a lot.

will there be any stars?

shothotbot — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:48:32 -0800

Smart playlists on my iTunes has stopped working. All my smart playlists which involve ratings are acting funny. When I edit the smart playlist instead of being able to pick a star/rating criteria (for example: 'rating is *****') I get a black, unclickable band as shown in this screenshot. I can still change the ratings on the songs normally.

Of course, it used to work great and nothing changed. I have already invoked the First Law of Computer Science and rebooted the machine a few times. I am running XP and my iTunes is current.

Could the fact that iTunes skipping be a sign that I need a new hard drive?

phr4gmonk3y — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:22:50 -0800

I just got my Macbook back from the Apple Store today after they replaced the logic board on the unit. I've noticed that every song I play in iTunes seems to skip. Finding this odd, I opened up the Activity Monitor and looked at disk usage. It seems like whenever a read to the disk is made, iTunes seems to begin skipping. Furthermore, I have the same problem after trying to play mp3's via mpg123. I'm worried that the skipping could be a sign my hard drive might be failing. I recently installed a brand new 250 GB hard drive from Newegg about a month and a half ago, so I'm somewhat skeptical. Is it a reasonable concern?

How can my friend get the rights to sell mp3s?

racecar — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:41:47 -0800

Who can license music for download/sale? A friend came up with a wicked cool idea for selling music using the internet, but it can't be done through some affiliate mp3 link (like Amazon). We're just a couple of college guys, and we don't know any rockstars or label executives. Are there smaller labels out there who can sell us the rights to offer downloads of their music? Is there typically some money we have to pay up front when signing up to sell a band's music? Will I need a lawyer?

We just want to sell music in this cool, immersive context on the internet, and would be willing to give the label/artist a bigger cut than other people do, because we think we can make money on other things, and even take a loss on song sales. (That's what Apple does with iTunes right? To sell iPods?)

Do we need to sign contracts with our school friends who are pretty good musicians? Or is it just enough to have them send us their mp3s and we give them money. (tax rules?) We can't afford lawyers, and we probably wouldn't want to talk to them.

It'd be good to have hip hop, or other music that specifically teenagers would like, but it'd be even better to have a broad collection.

Googling yields ASCAP, Walmart and other companies that might not talk to little old me.

My parents say that an idea isn't enough, that we have to build the application.

We're free this summer and could probably build something for musicians and record labels to see.

Whatever we do, we want to do it legal, we don't want to be oink or allofmp3 and get shut down.

I know people can't give me official legal advice, but anything at this point is helpful. We thought about just calling the record labels main numbers, but that sounds like a waste of time.

Researching going legit with dubiously sourced music collection

superfurry — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 03:55:59 -0800

Legitimizing iTunes Library. I have *ahem* a friend. This friend has a reasonably large digital music collection being managed by iTunes on a Mac. He would like to understand the cost of ensuring this collection is 100% legal, having realized that the vast majority of it is not. Purely out of curiosity, this *ahem* friend, has decided that maybe it would be a worthwhile thing to look into the cost of legitimately purchasing all the music in his digital collection. When this friend thinks about the fact that his largely ill-gotten music is being managed by iTunes, and that the iTunes Store probably 'stocks' a large proportion of this music, there might be a cool iTunes plugin that can do some amazing trick to give him a very good idea what the cost would be of purchasing all this music. Seems like a great opportunity for Apple to develop something like this.

Is there such a thing ? No matter whether it uses the iTunes Store, Amazon, etc.

It should be a plugin for iTunes or some other clever techy thing rather than manually doing an album count and then working it out from there.

Would also be ideal if it were OS X compatible.

What should I negotiate for the use of my song?

ludwig_van — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:56:03 -0800

What should I negotiate for the use of my song on a compilation? I have another licensing question. A (presumably small) Japanese record label wants to put one of my tracks on a compilation. They'll print 1000 copies at first which will be mostly distributed in Japan but some in the US. They will also sell the compilation on iTunes. They said the license is non-exclusive, the territory is world-wide, and they offered me 5 free samples and $150.

I thought that sounded pretty good, but I was thinking I should stipulate that this license is only for the 1000-copy run and we'd have to re-negotiate if they did another run, and that I should get a percentage of the iTunes sales. But then I was thinking maybe I should say no to the iTunes part together, since I already sell the song on iTunes myself, and why would I want them selling the same track there?

Does that make sense? Is there anything else I'm not thinking of?

Fight the power! Itunes Power!

Jonsnews — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:27:44 -0800

Is there a legal reason that I should not install Itunes on a higher ups computer here at work? We have recently implemented a very strict "no users are administrators, they cannot install their own programs, and no non-work related programs on work computers" policy.
I'm being directed by upper mgmt to install itunes on the laptops of several higher ups, because they do not have computers at home.
Yeah.. People who make 10X as much as me cannot afford to get a PC at home.
Anyway. I know the only way I can fight this, is to give them a legal issue as to why they can't download their itunes crap on work PCs. Is there any licensing issues I can mention, perhaps if they left the company, and the music was still on the computer. Or if since its company property, and my company doesn't own the liscense for the music on the PC, it could be an issue.

Yeah, I know I should probably be kissing these peoples asses. But its a policy, a policy that upper agreed on, I have to enforce it on lower people on the food chain, so...

I know YANOBL (You are not our business lawyer). But I am just looking for some input, or if I should just kowtow and do what they want and sell another piece of my soul to the man..

Help me organize my iTunes library!

cosmic osmo — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:53:40 -0800

What's the best way to organize and re-tag my enormous MP3 library? (iTunes, Mac 10.5, 20k+ songs) My goals for this project are to have every song in my library properly tagged (artist, album, year, track #, etc.) in a consistent format, with artwork where applicable. I'd also like to be able to distinguish sub-genres of music (i.e., neo-soul vs. new jack swing, or west coast g-funk vs. backpacker rap, or arena rock vs. shoegazer, or...), while still being able to browse by genre at large (r&b, hip hop, rock).

I've tried to do this manually using the allmusic database and infinite amounts of patience, but I have more than 20,000 songs and it's getting impractical. I have no idea what software I should use for a library this size--in the past I've used MPFreaker, but I doubt that's the best option any more.

So my questions:

1. What are some good software options to help me? I'm more than willing to pay a shareware fee to support the developers if it's a good program (again, I'm on Leopard, and I'm not willing to give up iTunes). For the most part the songs I have are already tagged, just not consistently. The songs are also a fair mix of MP3/AAC.

2. How have you tackled the subgenre issue in iTunes? Right now I have in the genre column "Main Genre: Subgenre," but I'm willing to hear other suggestions (I have no classical music to speak of, so the "category" and "grouping" info fields are up for grabs).

3. Practical suggestions about how to go about this? In the past when I've tried to organize my library, I've made one big playlist called "FIX," put the whole library in, and removed songs/albums when I was satisfied with their tags. Is there a better way?

Thanks!

iTunes' short attention span

paphun123 — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:54:34 -0800

How can I get iTunes to remember that I always want to manage my music and videos manually? Every time I plug my iPod nano 3g into the computer I have to check again the box for "Manually manage music and videos" and then OK the warning that I will have to manually eject the iPod. Can I bypass this routine somehow? Extra credit: How well does Sharepod work with the nano 3G's? iTunes up to date, iPod in disk mode, Windows XP

iTunes won't let me import files

puffmoike — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 10:10:36 -0800

Why is iTunes preventing me adding files to the library? Used to work fine, but now iTunes informs me that "You do not have enough access privileges for this operation". I have checked (via Get Info in OSX) the Permissions for my Music folder and each of the relevant subfolders and all show that I have Read & Write permission. Arrrgghhh! Further info:

Can't recall changing any settings, and it worked just fine until a few weeks ago.

OS X 10.5.3
iTunes 7.6.2 (9)
library resides on the primary drive of my MBP (Macintosh HD > Users > Puffmoike > Music > iTunes)

Windows Media Player to iTunes - help me avoid disaster!

CrazyGabby — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:29:52 -0800

I'm about to switch from Windows Media Player to iTunes (hubby is giving me his iPod Video, yay!). What should I know before making the switch? I would love any tips and tricks on switching over to iTunes/iPods. Basically, what do you wish you'd known ahead of time? A couple of notes:

- None of my music has DRM, so that's one less thing to worry about.
- I use ratings and play counts quite a bit, so would love to transfer those if possible. If not, it's not the end of the world.

Tips, info, and links are all welcome. Thank you!

80s power ballads, begone.

twistofrhyme — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:04:32 -0800

dumb question: when i delete a song from itunes, where does it go? i don't understand the delete mechanism in itunes. when i delete a photo in iphoto, for instance, it ends up in the iphoto trash, which i can then empty (as a seperate action from deleting my laptop's trash).

when i highlight a song in itunes and press delete, it vanishes from my itunes playlist. but it doesn't end up in my laptop's trash bin, and i don't see an itunes-specific trash. so where are those songs going, and how do i get rid of them for real, to free up some hard drive space?

oh, and i'm running osx 10.4.11.
thanks.