How to eliminate disc and track numbers in names?

1) I don't know.

2) Turn off the iTunes preference for "Keep iTunes folder organized", but it will still name the actual file something like +1-01 Radio Free Europe.mp3+


You can always rip the files using WMP. If you're using MP3 import settings they will still work with iTunes.
As far as I know, there's no way to turn this off within iTunes.

+Previous versions used to have a check box for including the track number as part of the name.+


You're not the first person to notice this. There is another discussion thread around here that talks about how to change it, but frankly it's too involved for me to bother with....editing some hex codes, ick.




+Get Info dialog's "Next" button to move through an alphabetically sorted song list, a song that the library song list says has a number in front of it (say, "01 Drift Away") will, when I pull it up in the Get Info dialog, show "Drift Away" as the file name, and the song list name will change to match, all without me doing anything. It's *REALLY* annoying.+



I've seen this reported too, iTunes changes when you click on the track because it reads the MP3 tag again. But something outside of itunes is also involved. Can't remember the details but if I stumble on a discussion where it's mentioned, I'll post back.

Since upgrading to iTunes 8 and 8.0.1, many of my song names now have "02" or "2-13" or something similar in front of them. In addition, the file names have been changed to include this as well.

The usual reason for having song names that start with numbers is that the files had no valid tag info. When iTunes imports file without tags (e.g. missing or unsupported) it uses the filename as the track title. One advantge of this is that you can at least recreate the track & disc numbers from the leading digits. Better yet you can find programs to do this all automatically. Having seen a number of posts from people who've accidentally destroyed their tag data by editing too many files at once I'm all for keeping the information in the file path just in case. iTunes truncates any track & folder names it generates to around 36 characters. If leading numbers matter to you then what about truncated filenames? For similar reasons as above I'm in favour of full lenght track names and disable the option to have iTunes rearrange my files.

Also, as I slowly plow through the library using the Get Info dialog's "Next" button to move through an alphabetically sorted song list, a song that the library song list says has a number in front of it (say, "01 Drift Away") will, when I pull it up in the Get Info dialog, show "Drift Away" as the file name, and the song list name will change to match, all without me doing anything. It's *REALLY* annoying.

This would suggest that, contraty to my initial guess, the files do have valid tags and that the problem is with the iTunes library metadata. One way to speed up re-reading them is to select a large number of files, Get Info, and then simply click OK without making any changes. This will force iTunes to scan the tags of all the selected files and update it's metadata.

tt2

In systems that display the filename (some car audio systems, for example), meaningful parts of the song name get lost because of the wasted space at the front of the names.

I see - are you burning tracks to disc then? If the device is reading from an iPod then it will be generating the name from the metadata - you could remove the track numbers but my guess is it would then play tracks in alphabetical order. Likewise a CD player will probably use the filename order for MP3-style CDs.

tt2

I'm pretty annoyed with this recent change too. I buy a lot of CDs and I've always thought that if the ID3 tag info includes the track number then the file name should not where as the artist and title are still my preference. Maybe it's time I find a way to use the lame encoder since it's supposed to do a really nice job with mp3s anyways.

If anyone from apple is listening it sure would be nice to have a way to specify the elements that you want your music named with when it's ripped.

That being said it looks like Doug at Doug's scripts has come up with an app to change hidden iTunes preferences that may include the option to undo the numbered track naming.
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=changehiddenprefs

Message was edited by: Eli Barb

Yeah, it's pretty easy on a Mac, but it's a royal pain on Windows.