Laurie Lewis Posted June 30, 2017 Share Posted June 30, 2017 I have been putting a number of albums into iTunes using the Autonatic Add Folder. I have been dragging the folders in there and they are in the structure albumartist/album/filename. the files have been named in the format [email protected]. This is all part of trying to get an old library updated. Anyway all the files are imported and placed in the correct artist/album format. What I have found is that Tracks 3 to 8 have been renamed Track 03, Track 04 etc. all the other files have retained their previous name both in iTunes and the file system allowing me to use Dougscripts to manipulate. Gets to the 9th track and back to how it is supposed to be. It has done this for EVERY album (50). Tried a restart and still happening. Latest version iTunes. any ideas? Laurie Link to comment
Ralf11 Posted June 30, 2017 Share Posted June 30, 2017 bulk rename? but back up everything right now before doing anything at all Link to comment
Laurie Lewis Posted June 30, 2017 Author Share Posted June 30, 2017 Sorry, forgot to mention. I am using the file name to add meta-data to the file, so by changing the file name lose the ability. Link to comment
Laurie Lewis Posted July 7, 2017 Author Share Posted July 7, 2017 Well I am still struggling with this. I added the original copies of my files to the relevant iTunes directory in my Library. In this case Lucinda Williams/World Without Tears. I then ran Dougs Script "Music Folder Files Not Added" and it went through and found the files. I then had the script Add the files to my library. As you can see Tracks 3-8 have been renamed and they have overwritten the previous files. The other tracks have been added as duplicates with the -1 added to the file names. Any ideas? Laurie Link to comment
DougAdams Posted July 7, 2017 Share Posted July 7, 2017 What are the settings in iTunes > Preferences > Advanced regarding how iTunes manages added files and the library? dougscripts.com Link to comment
Laurie Lewis Posted July 7, 2017 Author Share Posted July 7, 2017 Doug the unusual part is it is only Tracks 3 to 8. Nothing before and nothing after. To me that sounds like a bug in iTunes. Does it with Automatic Add Folder as well (you probably read that) Laurie Link to comment
Laurie Lewis Posted July 7, 2017 Author Share Posted July 7, 2017 Doug, I just created a new library on another drive and tried to add a number of albums. Same problems - Track 3 - 8. First image is a copy of the original file names. Second image shows the new iTunes library in Finder. Laurie Link to comment
DougAdams Posted July 7, 2017 Share Posted July 7, 2017 What is the source of the files? Could they have been ripped/prepared on a non-Mac machine? dougscripts.com Link to comment
Laurie Lewis Posted July 7, 2017 Author Share Posted July 7, 2017 They were Doug. Ripped on a Windows XP machine. Though, the described behaviour has only just started. I have done many hundreds of albums and this has only just started. Not sure if it was immediately after the last iTunes update as I only happened to catch the changed behaviour by accident. I was not checking previously as it was working correctly. Link to comment
Laurie Lewis Posted July 7, 2017 Author Share Posted July 7, 2017 Just went and grabbed the wife's MacBook Pro and tried importing the files. iTunes 12.5.5.5. Exactly same result. Tried changing the ownership of the files. Same problem. ??????? Link to comment
DougAdams Posted July 7, 2017 Share Posted July 7, 2017 I ask because I have also, coincidentally, been seeing issues with MP3s ripped/prepared elsewhere whereby the meta-data text contains improper control characters. Typically, these are invisible on a Mac. But they render the affected tag in iTunes blank (eg: no Artist tag, no Album tag). I wonder if this is an issue with iTunes or the OS since, as we both have noticed, this seems to be new recent behavior. I suspect that your files may have "corrupted" title information in the meta-data and thus the generic "Track" is used for the file name. To some degree, this doesn't appear to bother iTunes since the name tag appears properly in the interface. So I'm wondering where in the chain the title tag--if so affected--is being borked. Do you have any other software that can read tags from a file's meta-data? I am curious whether the "Movie Inspector" in QuickTime, for example, correctly displays Name Artist and Album for those "Track" files. dougscripts.com Link to comment
Laurie Lewis Posted July 7, 2017 Author Share Posted July 7, 2017 Ok, you are correct. Was it ever in doubt. Lots of photos attached. I have looked at various files using MusicBrainz Picard, XLD, Music Tag Editor and Quicktime. Sure enough the tags are incorrect for some files but not for others. All these files were ripped on the same computer using the same software. They were all processed and renamed also using another program from a CSV file. I have been processing these files for some time and had a break and came back to it. The other interesting aspect was that I looked at one directory (Dave Stewart) that I had previously processed. It came up incorrect for the track name tag but it had imported correctly previously with the filenames being the track titles. Going to try importing the files and not allowing iTunes to copy or organise the files to see if that works Link to comment
Laurie Lewis Posted July 7, 2017 Author Share Posted July 7, 2017 Ok, if I place the files outside iTunes and add the directory to iTunes library I still get the same result. The big difference is that I can then use your script for Filenames to Song Names to correct the issue. In the Auto Add directory it changes the filenames. Thanks Doug, you have pointed me in the correct direction but I can not explain what has happened. I might just be going mad. Guess I will just have to go about it differently. Link to comment
DougAdams Posted July 7, 2017 Share Posted July 7, 2017 Well, there you are. If you are able to edit the metadata using some app (I'm afraid I cannot recommend one off-hand), I would see if you can enter new data for the "corrupted" tags. I suspect something got in there. As you say you were also using a CSV file on Windows XP for source information; could be dicey text in there, too, further aggravated by cross-platform text incompatibilities. In my own experience with this phenomenon, I was attempting to write a bit of softwrae to read the text from the metadata of files downloaded from a free audiobooks site. I could only render the first two files' data, the remainder rendered blank text but the data was clearly there. I had to write a routine to clear invisible control characters from every tag I wanted to read; that rendered the tags visible. dougscripts.com Link to comment
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