Media managment when changing metadata

Do you have iTunes prefs -> *Keep iTunes media folder organized* ticked?
If so, uncheck it then click OK. Then retick it and click OK.

I think you'll find iTunes doesn't apply a simple change of case as it does a case-insensitive comparison of the "before" and "after" values and only updates the file/folder names if it see a change. Add an intermediate change that adds or removes a letter to enforce the change.

E.g. change:
This group
This GroupX
This Group

tt2

Itunes will only change the file names if they are
1) in the itunes media folder
2) itunes is set to organize that folder

As long as you are happy with the tag information then it really doesn't matter what the files themselves are called as, in general, you'll be using an application to access the media, not the filing system. The one exception might be if you are using a 3rd party media player, like my old iRiver H140, which has an interface based on the file system instead of the media tags.

That aside I like full control of how things are organised too. Do you need the XML to be correct, as this is only used by 3rd party software, or is it enough to have the filenames correct in Explorer? If all you want to correct is some capitalisations, then various 3rd party tagging or file management tools might be able to achieve this. Provided it is only the case of a few letters that has changed then iTunes will still be able to access the file. However it gets more complex if, like me, you want to have full length file and folder names for artists/albums/tracks with more than 35 characters or control character substitution for characters which are not permitted in filenames. Change any of this outside iTunes and it will no longer be able to find the file. You then have to manually relink the files one-by-one or remove and reimport. The first way is too much effort for all but a small number of files, the second means discarding any volatile iTunes metadata such as ratings, play counts and date added information, which may or may not be an issue in your particular case.

Until recently I've been removing & reimporting using MediaMonkey for the renames (don't let it grab the file associations if you decide to install it) as it has some nice tools for renaming files based on their tags. Lately however I've been using my own script which manages the links in iTunes and thus maintains all the iTunes specific metadata. I've released a few of my scripts at http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/scripts.asp but I don't think this one is robust enough for general release yet. Hopefully I'll get it to that point in the next week or so...

tt2

No, TagFromFilename works in the other direction, setting missing information in iTunes from the filename and folder path, it's particularly suited to adding missing information when files are missing tags.

Are you saying that if, for example, you orginally had a track called *This is a made-up song* which you later corrected to *This Is A Made-Up Song* that the filename remains as *This is a made-up song.mp3* but the XML incorrectly records it as *This Is A Made-Up Song.mp3*, or perhaps vice-versa?

If that's the problem then I might be able to write a script to update the database where the case sensitive version of the filename doesn't match what's recorded. At the trivial level though, simply removing & reimporting ought to do the trick, but I'm guessing you want to preserve various bits of meta-data or you'd just start from scratch on the Ubuntu system.

tt2

Create an empty playlist and drag one or two albums from an affected artist into it. Export the playlist as XML Now try using my script SortDateAdded. Export the playlist as XML again and compare with the original. This should do the trick, but will be much slower than something that only updates iTunes when the database doesn't match the file system. I don't have time to work on it today but I think it will be easy enough to adapt one of my existing scripts for this if you can hang on for a day or two.

tt2

Ah, if you've got *Keep iTunes Media folder organised* enabled then of course it wouldn't work. iTunes would have read the original path, then "updated" it for the case changes, but not actually applied that change to the file system.

Please repeat the test using CheckFileCase. This will compare and if necesary correct the cases of the filename, album folder and artist folder. If there is a discrepancy further up the path it will be reported but not corrected. Inconsistencies in case for Artist & Album names across different tracks are not tested for but will lead to unpredictable results, with the Artist & Album folder names taking the case implied by the last file that is processed.

tt2