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Level 1

9 points

iTunes library sorted to "unknown" album on pc and iTunes

Please help! I have called customer support twice, uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes and tried renaming the albums in my iTunes library and in the iTunes Music folder on my pc.

Suddenly yesterday all of the songs became sorted alphabetically in an unknown album with the wrong cover or no cover (multiple unknown albums), all the playlists are empty and my 120 iPod Classic will not synch the tunes back to the correct album. The library was fine for the last year, now it changed mysteriously and I can't bulk sort the songs back to their original locations.

The only thing I was able to do was manualy rename the album the individual songs belong to, then it created the album again but would not synch to the iPod.

I'm a musician and need these songs back the way I had them sorted. This problem has made the whole thing unusable.

Windows Vista

Posted on Jul 11, 2010 10:24 AM

21 replies

Bonzo1 Author

Level 1

9 points

Jul 13, 2010 3:45 PM in response to turingtest2

I just tried MP3Tag and if found the artist names and song names but found the wrong album which is the same for all the ones it found. For more than half the songs, it did not find any album name. I'm stuck when it gets to this point, do I have to manually re-label them or will the software do it on it's own somehow?

turingtest2

Level 10

272,881 points

Jul 13, 2010 4:49 PM in response to Bonzo1

I was hoping MP3Tag might have revealed that there are multiple tags, some missing details such as the album title, which will be what iTunes is reading, but others with all the info. The ID3 spec. allows for multiple tags, different versions to provide backwards compatability to earlier software and multiple languages. Deleting incomplete tags would hopefully force iTunes to use the complete ones. A long shot on the language thing, although I live in the UK I opt to revert iTunes to US English as I prefer the wording *TV Shows* over *TV Programmes*. The 9.2 upgrade had a shot a reseting a couple of preferences which might hsve included the region setting.

It's been a while since I played with MP3Tag, and then it was for tweaking podcast attributes, but many tag editors include tools for copying data between different tags or deleting them. Perhaps another editor would server better or you might have more luck with MusicBrainz Picard.

tt2

Bonzo1 Author

Level 1

9 points

Jul 13, 2010 5:13 PM in response to Bonzo1

I'll try the Picard. Now I can't restore my iPod. Getting an error that another program is using it.

Jul 14, 2010 12:08 PM in response to Bonzo1

Has anyone tried this?

http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/scripts.asp

Bonzo1 Author

Level 1

9 points

Jul 15, 2010 4:01 AM in response to SongQuester

I found this and it cleaned up 100 songs and artwork for free. You have to pay if you want unlimited track cleanup which at this point is worth it for me.

http://www.tuneupmedia.com/videob.php

Aug 15, 2010 9:48 PM in response to Bonzo1

My problem is right now I have showing in the album art viewing, a song from my Martina McBride Greatest Hits album (Track 2: Life #9) is showing unknown album and no picture. Though when I click "get info" it shows up in the summary and info the name of the song, the artist, the year, the album artist, track number ( 2 of 19), album name, the composer and the genre all filled out. How do I get it to recognize it in the album art viewing? (I even tried to buy again to see if that would work but it did not) HELP!

iTunes library sorted to "unknown" album on pc and iTunes