Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with osx and itunes

How to bulk rename itunes files from external data source.

jlowen — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:10:40 -0800

How can I bulk rename files in itunes according to data contained in a separate file? I have 4000-some .wav files in itunes that are essentially field recordings of people talking. The files are named with a 10 digit unique id number and the date acquired. Example: 1234567890_11122009. In a separate csv file I have the identifying information of the individual with the same unique ID number.

I have rated all 4000 recordings based on quality and want to maintain those ratings, but would like to rename the files to drop the unique ID and instead insert the person's name from the csv file. I.e. 1234567890_11122009 becomes Smith_Mary_123_Fake_Street_Anytown_STATE

Can anyone picture a workflow that would accomplish this mass filename change while still maintaining the ratings?

I use a mac and have a decent understanding of automator, grep, csv files etc, but have no real programming skill. I am willing to convert recordings to a different format (mp3 etc.) if that would help. Any ideas?

Useful iTunes keyboard shortcuts?

OmieWise — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 07:28:55 -0800

Is there a way, within iTunes, to change playlists (or navigate back to the main library) and to place the cursor in the search box using just the keyboard? I cannot find these options on any list of iTunes keyboard shortcuts, but I'm trying to rescue many gigs worth of music, and all the clicking around is killing me.

Halt, iTunes.

Pants! — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:47:01 -0800

Running Mac OSX, my iTunes window keeps moving so that the grey section that contains the play buttons, volume control, etc is hidden above the top of the screen. How do I fix it?

Kraftwerk is just out of my reach!

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 02:49:38 -0800

How can I change file extensions on a group of files "in bulk", specifically from .flac to .mp3? Keywords: iTunes, Mac, OS X. I just downloaded the entire Kraftwerk ouvre via BitTorrent. Hooray. However, are of the files are ".flac" and I need to change them to .mp3 to be able to add them to my iTunes library (right now iTunes won't add them). There are over 60 songs in the BitTorrent file. Any way can highlight all of them and change all of the file extensions at once?

Thanks!

How can I automatically add tracks to the OS X iTunes Library?

harkin banks — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:05:26 -0800

Is there a scriptable solution to add items to the OS X iTunes library? I am in the process of switching management of my iPod from my older XP desktop to my MacBook. For a couple of years now I have been using a homegrown Perl program to download podcasts, and then running the console version of iTunes Library Updater as a scheduled task to automatically add them to the iTunes library. It's great -- works totally in the background, and when I sync my iPod everything is Just There.

I'd like to duplicate this process on my MacBook. The Perl script obviously ports fine, and I can schedule it using cron, but I can't find a way to automatically add items to the iTunes library. Some things I've considered:

-- iTLU is written in .NET, so that's out (unless it runs under mono -- but I fear that way lies madness.)

-- At Doug's Applescripts, the suggested solution is to add a folder action to the folder you want to watch. However, my understanding is that folder actions only work if the folder is actively being worked with in the Finder (open, having things dropped on it, etc.), so adding files to my podcast folder behind the scenes won't trigger a folder action.

-- There's a Mac::iTunes module on CPAN, but it looks pretty unfinished (for instance, under "Bugs" for Mac::iTunes::Library::Write it says "just wait".)

This is for a MacBook running Leopard. Any suggestions?

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?

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.

Whats a good streaming source for Leopard?

DJWeezy — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:23:16 -0800

What is a good icecast source client for leopard? So I have recently begun trivia contests on some irc channels where i will host whoever wants to play some music and people will guess the song. I host these on my vps that runs icecast/shoutcast right now. Unfortunately i have yet to find a good program that will take the sound from my sound card on my mac and send it to my server for other people to listen too. When i was on windows i used oddcast. Anyone know of a good program for this? Also it need to not tell everyone what song is playing.

bonus: i was having trouble googling this, if you find one that way let me know you search terms.

Get iphoto/itunes files off local drive? Maybe S3?

namith — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:41:12 -0800

I'm looking for some best practice advice in moving my iTunes music and my iPhoto images off my local hard drive. The 160GB drive on my Macbook is about full. I know I can use a USB/Firewire/Network-attached external hard drive, but has anyone had luck using a service such as Amazon's S3 for this. I know if works fine for storing the files, but how usable is it to actually 'get' the files? I guess I could keep just select sets of photos and music on my local drive and store the rest of the files on S3. I would then just have to refresh my music from time to time?

What's everyone else doing?

fetching itunes album art in os x

willmillar — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:44:31 -0800

i have a 12,000 track itunes music library in os x. some of the tracks (~10%) have album art with them, but most do not. all tracks are tagged properly, and in theory should all have album art with them. i've tried itunes built in fetcher and many third party programs for adding album art. i can't recall names of programs, but most were very poor and would crash or not work at all. i would like to fetch art all together, because i don't want to go through 12,000 songs track-by-track. any ideas? thanks! -will

What tools exist for OS X to manage my music library?

Loto — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:17:27 -0800

What tools exist for OS X to manage my music library? My music collection is a huge mess, and I would like to fix this. I use iTunes to keep track of everything but there isn't really a way to make sweeping modifications to tags, to check the validity of the tags and titles, or to remove doubles.

My question is this: Are there any programs available for OS X (preferably free) to manage a music library? To remove multiple copies of the same song? To fix ID3 tags and song titles? Album art?

Thanks!

Making Digital Booklets for iTunes on OSX

drgonzo2k2 — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 08:44:07 -0800

I have the artwork/booklets for a number of CDs scanned in, and I would like to edit them and convert them to a PDF for use as a digital booklet in iTunes on OSX. What is the easiest way to go about doing this? Bonus points if I don't have to buy any software!

iTunes to Flash?

emelenjr — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 19:00:21 -0800

What's the best way to turn an iTunes (Mac) playlist into a self-contained Flash player that will play the music in that playlist? It seems like someone should have already figured this out and created some kind of script that can do it, but I haven't been able to find any such thing.

Song files in iTunes pointing to the wrong location.

einarorn — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 07:29:13 -0800

How can I fix 6.000 tracks in iTunes, which have a wrong file path, without losing play counts and ratings? I just re-installed OSX on my Mac. After I did that some of the files on my external drive iTunes library are pointing to the wrong location.

Both the music files and the iTunes library are located on an external drive called "Musica". However, around half of the files seem to have the wrong path set in iTunes and therefore iTunes can't find them.

They are pointing at "Musica/FOLDER/Radiohead/OK Computer" - instead of the right one, which should be "Musica/Radiohead/OK Computer"

Now, this is easy to fix by just changing things around in the XML file. However, if I do that and re-import the XML, I will lose 4 years worth of play counts and ratings. And that's something I simply am not willing to do. The only one other way I know to do this is to point at each and every file and find the right location for each file. However, since I probably have more than 6.000 files pointing at the wrong location (I have around 8.000 pointing at the right one) that would take me days to complete.

So, are there any other ways to do this?

Autocomplete track name fields in itunes?

horsemuth — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 09:26:46 -0800

Is there a way to set itunes to autocomplete the track name field? When editing the "artist" field, itunes uses some sort of autocomplete feature to fill in artist names. I would like to enable this for the "name" field as well. I have searched Doug's Applescripts and come up empty, and Google has yielded nothing usable either. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I might make this work?

How to identify corrupt MP3 files out of thousands?

rglass — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 18:17:02 -0800

How to identify corrupted MP3 files? I have thousands to go through, but only some are bad. (OSX) I have 14,000 songs, and some are corrupted. I've narrowed it down to artists starting with P, S & T. When I try to import a corrupted MP3 file into itunes, the computer freezes up and I have to reboot. How can I locate the corrupt files without having to test each one and crash the computer time after time?

Running OSX Tiger on a Macbook.

iTunes and shared libraries

Pinback — Mon, 14 May 2007 22:30:28 -0800

iTunes: is there any way of making it look at "Shared" music by default? So, my iTunes library is stored on a network drive on a Linux SMB server. This works fine for iTunes on my desktop machine, an old eMac - the network drive is set to automount, and iTunes is happy. I fiddled with daapd (an iTunes server; basically the unix equivalent to checking "share my library on my local network" in iTunes) yonks ago, but it was a bit limited then.

Fast-forward to a few days ago, when my shiny new MacBook turned up. After setting up the wireless network, I investigated daapd again. The latest incarnation (Firefly Media Server) works well enough for my laptoppy purposes, and I've got it set up and working.

The only remaining problem/annoyance is that iTunes on the MacBook defaults to opening the (empty) local library at startup. I have no desire to copy my library over to the laptop, nor to automount that network drive (as it won't always be available). Is it possible to have iTunes default to browsing a shared library instead?

(To illustrate: when I start iTunes I want to see this, not this.)

Itunes is not counting play counts and recently played tracks from my ipods.

rglass — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:26:06 -0800

Itunes is not counting play counts and recently played tracks from my ipods. Itunes is not counting play counts and recently played tracks from my ipods.

I have a 3G ipod and a 1G nano which I sync about once a week with itunes 7.0 on my Macbook.

When I play songs on itunes, the play count for that song increases by one and it appears in the Recently Played playlist (and is submitted to LastFM, by the way).

When I connect my ipod and do a complete sync, play counts are not updated and songs played do not seem to appear in the Recently Played playlist (and are not submitted to LastFM).

I have both ipods to sync specific playlists, and I have not checked the box that says "Manually Manage Music" on the ipod summary screen (I heard that can cause sync problems).

I thought it might be a chronology problem – that if I played my last ipod track at 2 PM and my last itunes track at 3 PM, that when I did a sync it wasn't tracking anything from before my last played itunes track. (Did I explain that clearly?) But that isn't it. I've been using itunes for years and I've never seen it behave that way before,
and I just did a test, using my ipod for 24 hours without playing any tracks on itunes. I did a sync, and none of them are in Recently Played, and the play counts have not changed.

What's going on? How can I get itunes to keep track of the songs I play on my ipod? (Can't get them submitted to LastFM either, but that's a secondary issue).

Some music doesn't load in iTunes for XP but works fine on Mac

TurkeyMustard — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:25:58 -0800

Some music copied from an Mac drive to a Windows drive doesn't load in iTunes on Windows XP. I have about 190GB of music (about 35,000 songs) on a FAT32 drive plugged into an ordinary tower Compaq via USB2. The music was formerly used in iTunes on Mac OS X 10.4.8 on a big HFS+ drive, but I copied it off to other drives, reformatted the big drive (which is less than three months old) as FAT32 and then copied the music back.

However, when I import the songs into iTunes for XP, only 90GB (about 19,000 songs) show up in the program. They all show up fine in iTunes for Mac OS X. Both are using the latest iTunes. I've tried numerous reimports with no luck. I've also tried a smaller drive, with a subset of files, but only part of those showed up in iTunes, too.

Thinking it might be a problem with copying, I've also copied the data over a second time to the drive reformatted as NTFS. I've also tried copying the data from Mac drives to the Windows drive using the Macdrive software to mount the Macs in Windows. I've also tried copying using SMB filesharing, using FTP, and using a weird Parallels-folder-sharing combo. All with no change in how many files import.

So, what I'm looking for is ideas on what might be the problem. Is it strange Mac-only characters or Mac-only names? I have a lot of international music with foreign characters. But shouldn't FAT32 handle accents, tildes, umlauts, and whatever just fine? Just in case, I ran a few scripts that clean up a bunch of strange characters, but it didn't seem to change the number of songs that would import.

Is it possible metadata embedded in files cannot be used? Some of the music probably does include metadata in various kinds of ID tags, and maybe also includes album art (though I have no way of determining that, I think).

Are there permissions or privileges that should be changed on the copied files?

Any ideas or tricks to try would be appreciated. I'm reluctant to just abandon 100GB of music.

How to move iTunes and iPhoto libraries to a network drive?

drgonzo2k2 — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:53:11 -0800

What is the easiest way to move my iTunes and iPhoto libraries from an external USB drive to a network drive? Currently I have both my iTunes and iPhoto libraries stored on an external HD that is connected by USB to my Mac Mini. My wife and I share the same libraries. To achieve that, I've done the following:

1. All files are stored in a "music" and "photos" folder on the external drive.

2. I created aliases of those folders and renamed them "iTunes" and "iPhoto Library"

3. I then replaced those folders with the aliases in my wife's and my user directories.

This means that the media and the library files are all on the external drive, and we didn't have to work any voodoo to get iTunes and iPhoto to recognize the libraries.

Now that this HD is full, and we're only going to acquire more content, and possibly more computers, I decided to build a home server and keep all the files there. I've bought an old G4 dual processor for this purpose, and I have outfitted it with 1TB of RAID-5 storage. Now what would be the easiest way to transfer my libraries to the RAID and not lose anything? Here's what I was thinking:

1. Since everything is on a USB drive, just hook it up to the G4 and use RsyncX to copy the movies and photos folders to the RAID.

2. Map the network drive, and set it as a login item on both accounts.

3. Again, create the aliases and place them in our user folders as above.

My main concern is that the files will by physically located on a different drive, so will that end up messing up my library files? I mean, will it know where the files are? If not, can someone walk me through an easy process of achieving this?

Burning DVDs in iTunes

BlzOfGlry — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 16:41:48 -0800

OS X Newbiefilter - Burning a DVD in iTunes on OS X - Will the disk be readable on a PC? I'm trying to burn a couple of DVD's of a very large playlist through iTunes in OS X (it's my mega playlist of Coachella 2007 artists, if anyone cares), and it's not 100% clear if said DVD is going to be readable by a Windows XP PC.

OS X identifies the format of the disk as HFS +, but the help files say that the normal Finder 'burn folder' uses a hybrid format, which will be readable by windows. Is this the same for iTunes?

I know 100% that I can do it in OS X using Toast or another similar program, but honestly I don't own any of them, and I'm guessing that would take some messing around to burn my smart playlist from iTunes?

I'm mailing these disks to a friend, and I don't have immediate access to a PC to test any of these theories. Any suggestions to accomplish this with minimal cost/hassle would be appreciated.

My Library! Its being held prisoner! Oh, sob, all my lovely ratings....

Brainy — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 20:39:07 -0800

Had PC, got Mac, want to get ALL my songs + metadata off my iPod and into my Mac library. Have tried a few programs and they didn't work out exactly right. Your recommendations please! I tried this a couple of weeks ago and I tried Senuti and iPodRip and neither of them worked (although I can't remember how, maybe one errored, one didn't copy playcount or something). So what programs do you guys recommend? I NEED my ratings, playcount, last played date, as I have tons of smart playlists based on them.

AirTunes, anyone?

dance — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 07:36:13 -0800

Suggestions for AirTunes Fun / Hacks, please! I've just ordered an Apple Airport Express w/ AirTunes from an eBay seller. I'm very much looking forward to receiving it and playing with it. I'm looking for some tips, fun tricks/hacks and advice from owners. Ideally I'd like to use it to:

1. Extend the range of an existing unencrypted WLAN
2. Stream audio to my hi-fi.
3. Share a HP1200 with a Mac and a PC

Possible complications:
1. The WLAN AP is a WRT54G (so supposedly compatible) but it isn't mine. My neighbour very kindly shares his internet with all in range, but I very much doubt he'd be willing to allow me access to its settings to configure it if that's necessary?
2. I had wanted to use this setup for DVDs too, in conjunction with AirFoil, but I've read that delays are prohibitive.
3. The printer should ideally stay in the office, not move to the living room to be next to the AirPort Express and Hi-Fi - I guess for this I'd need two AirPorts!

So - it's up to you if you'd like to comment on the above, but what I'd also really appreciate are thoughts, experiences, hacks anecdotes from existing owners.

Thanks!

Programmatic iTunes library mods

ChrisR — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 13:05:38 -0800

I'm looking for some kind of library for reading and writing from the iTunes database. I emphasize that because I'm not interested in dealing with the iPod, except in the sense that I want to have a setup similar to that described in this thread.

My issue is similar to this poster's. I will have the vast bulk of my music on an NFS share on my old machine, with some subset on the new hotness of my Macbook Pro. Since I'm reasonably competent at the coding thing, but less competent at the reverse engineering thing, I want to make use of someone else's invention of the wheel.

Broadly speaking, I want to maintain two libraries for iTunes, one of which that includes the files on both my MacBook and my NFS share, and one of which that includes only those on the macbook. Further, I want to be able to synchronize them when I change states from connected to unconnected and vice versa. The last thing I want to do is have some kind of easy (in the sense that mv $folder $newfolder && update_lib_locations $oldfolder $newfolder is easy. I'm not looking for AI, here) way of moving files between underlying stores.

So, to sum up:

I want to provide the illusion of one single library, that gains and loses songs depending on my connected storage devices.

I expect to have to write this myself.

I'm totally new to the Mac

I want a freakin' pony!

An equally good answer would be step by step instructions on setting up the same idea. The solution I linked to above isn't good enough because it involves too many manual steps. Less mousing == goodness.

Thanks.

Help me rock out wirelessly

unSane — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 07:02:47 -0800

How do I listen to last.fm via airtunes? I want to listen to last.fm on my hi fi. I can listen to iTunes just fine via airtunes, but I can't figure out how to listen to a live stream from the last.fm player. I have Audio Hijack and can record the stream and play it later, but I want to be able to divert the audio stream straight to airtunes. Any clues?