thelovelyman
Level 1
(0 points)
Q: Any software that can rebuild iTunes songs lost to Unknown Artist/ Unknown Album
iTunes sent 80% of my songs (about 20000 songs of 475GB) into Unknown Artist/ Album folder. My songs were ripped in .WAV and .AIFF formats and residing in 1.5 TB external hard disk. I realise how to rebuild them manually (through 'locate and search' but it will take eternity to complete. I don’t have backup copy of my music file and I can’t re-import (ripping) them from the CDs.
Is there software that can rebuild songs from this Unknown artist/ album folder back to the Artist/Album folders on iTunes Media/Music/.... (or to any specified directory/folder).
All my itunes library files, music metadata are intact. Artwork, Album, Artist name and track number and song names, genres etc are showing on itunes GUI. This problem should be technically solvable by a program. Any help or pointer in the right direction will be appreciated.
turingtest2
Level 10
(84,964 points)
OK, here we have an album in my test library in the standard location for it...
Now I'm going to simulate the disaster by renaming the folder containing the files as Unknown Artist\Unknown Album. Note how each track now shows the ! for missing tracks.
Next I select the 12 tracks and run the FindTracks script.
I've clicked No on the first prompt so that I can get track by track confirmation. Next I check that the correct path has been assumed for the media folder to be searched. Note this must be a parent folder of where the files actually are. The script may not guess this initial value correctly if content is split over multiple paths/drives instead of the standard iTunes layout.
The script will search the following potential locations for each track:
- <Media Folder>
- <Media Folder>\<Album Artist>
- <Media Folder>\<Album Artist>\<Album>
- <Media Folder>\<Artist>
- <Media Folder>\<Artist>\<Album>
- <Media Folder>\<Album>
- <Media Folder>\Compilations\<Album>
- <Media Folder>\Music
- <Media Folder>\Music\<Album Artist>
- <Media Folder>\Music\<Album Artist>\<Album>
- <Media Folder>\Music\<Artist>
- <Media Folder>\Music\<Artist>\<Album>
- <Media Folder>\Music\<Album>
- <Media Folder>\Music\Compilations\<Album>
- <Media Folder>\Music\Unknown Artist\Unknown Album
- <Media Folder>\Unknown Artist\Unknown Album
With optimizations when <Album>=<Album Artist>=<Artist>. For all searches outside of the Unknown Artist\Unknown Album folder there is a fuzzy matching mechanism which can cope with, for example, longer/truncated file & folder names or different filename character substitutions. Other types of media will be searched for in their usual locations relative to the media folder.
(Note to self: Add in ability to cope with missing track numbers)
Having confirmed the media location the script comes back with the first proposed correction. Yes will update the location of the track, No will skip that track, and Cancel aborts the script.
After all the tracks have been processed, or you press Cancel, there is a summary of the activity. Obviously confirming each track one at a time would be boring so once you've proved the script is effective it is time to run it on larger groups of files in automatic mode which will display a progress bar so you can see that it is still working. If you close the progress bar the script will safely complete its current operation and then offer to abort or resume.
tt2
