iTunes 12.9 changing album metadata when I play a track

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iTunes 12.9 changing album metadata when I play a track

So I have been importing albums from minidisk to iTunes - fairly laborious realtime recording into Audacity and importing - entering all the metadata manually. One 'Various Artists' album (called Frontline) got mixed up and in sorting it somehow I changed ALL the album titles to Frontline (didnt know I could do that - must have had then all selected by mistake). There was no undo but luckily I could reimport library from a recent back up and all seemed fine. EXCEPT now every time I play a track iTunes renames that track to being form the Frontline album ! Have quit, restarted iMac and unticked 'organise' in advanced prefs. Still does it. From the list of songs, double clicking on any song renames its album meta..... Please help - this is infuriating and will eventually render iTunes unuseable.

iMac Retina running Mojave

Posted on May 21, 2020 1:23 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

turingtest2

Level 10

274,276 points

May 21, 2020 3:08 PM in response to Stibble

Hi,

Ideally you would have restored the entire state of the library the moment you realised the mistake. Since you carried on adding media I would suggest you first sort the library by date added and drag & drop the most recent additions out to another folder, perhaps on the desktop, or somewhere else suitable if your desktop folder syncs to iCloud. You should then be able to restore the entire state of the iTunes folder from backup, which will restore the primary database (the .itl file), its supporting files, and the media files with the original metadata, set out in their original album folders. Once that is done you can take the new files that you moved elsewhere and move them into the Automatically Add to iTunes folder to merge them into the restored library.

tt2

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

274,276 points

May 21, 2020 1:44 PM in response to Stibble

Presumably you have just restored the database from before this error, but not previous state of the media files. Thus when one is played iTunes reads the current data in the file and displays it to you. Do you have a backup of the media as well as the database?

tt2

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Answer 3

Stibble Author

Level 1

13 points

May 21, 2020 1:56 PM in response to Stibble

Little more information...when I go and look at the song info --> file, every single piece of music has this path /Users/myname/iTunes/Music/Artistname/The Frontline/no.& track name ! Somehow iTunes has added a wrapper called The Frontline in the path to every single song ! HELP !

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Answer 4

Stibble Author

Level 1

13 points

May 21, 2020 2:02 PM in response to turingtest2

Sorry tt2 - my additional info crossed with your answer. That makes sense as when I look at tracks added since the restore they do NOT have the additional wrapper (not sure if thats the right word but you know what I mean) in the pathway. I will have a back up of the media. Is it called iTunes library extras.itdb by any chance (as I think I restored iTunes Library.itl initially) ?

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Answer 5

Stibble Author

Level 1

13 points

May 21, 2020 2:18 PM in response to Stibble

I wonder whether, given the huge additional amount of work I have performed manually adding music since the 'issue', would it not perhaps be sensible to rebuild the entire library by deleting the .itl and .itdb files and then importing the itunes/music folder afresh ? I could export the library first, as a back up somewhere, and then re-import just the playlists afterwards eh ? Does that make sense. Or is it just simpler/safer to go and find a back up of the 'media files' .

Sorry for the many questions and thanks for taking the time to help

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