iTunes metadata and artwork

Side note: When I purchased an Apple TV and looked at My Music, it's only finding/seeing purchased songs.  How can I set it so it sees my entire iTunes library?

Totally unrelated, iTunes 10.7 will not play songs out of Apple store to preview. Is there something I need to do? It's not worked for quite a while.  I know I need to update my version but I just so strongly dislike any version past this one that I hate to do it.

Perhaps both of these are related to my being on 10.7. I can't log into my account in 10.7 any longer - it's saying I need to upgrade my software - which seems a bit of a drag. I'm kicking and screaming against updating but I suppose I might as well. Any thoughts?

One more thing - I renamed some song files (something I had wanted to do) for an artist (3 Dog Night - to - Three Dog Night). As I went through, usually when I play the first one, then do "locate it now" (since the file name changed) - it is not finding the other same-artist named songs. Most were in the same folder. Usually if that's the case, it will find them but that did not happen here so I had to go through one-by-one which was a tedious process.

Just a side comment, if I search "3 Dog Night" it brings up 5 of the 35 Three Dog Night titles. All the artist names on artist, album within itunes and the files themselves are all spelled now as Three Dog Night. I wonder why iTunes still sees 5 of the formerly named songs. And the 5 that come up all say Three Dog Night.

The reason that is SO critically important is that I will be using the "description" field you showed me how to do to convert en mass, and then move out/back in and then play one - and have iTunes find it as well as the other files in the same folder. Perhaps it's because I changed the name of the file for the artist and won't be doing that when I do the converting on all the other song files.

I'm hoping to hear from you soon, but am always appreciative of your time. As mentioned earlier today, your script did not process/work for me. It could be operator error but I did it like I've done many times now in testing your scripts so I don't think so.

Okay. Are there any special instructions in using that script? Do you have a short list of the task order for running that script? I did save the script.

Now that you've nailed this solution for me, do you have any idea on what I should focus on next?

One thought is to address all these album art images in many of the folders such as below...

Earlier in our discussion exchanges you said; "I can offer another tool for cleaning up unwanted folder images." And you've mentioned artwork with folders several times. I'd just like to clean up everything I can so I can be as pristine as possible.

Aside from this, I've asked several questions along the way but do want to stay focused as you suggested. Would it help if I quickly organized a few of the things outside our main focus for you to consider to decide which make sense (if you're willing to help some more). :)

Again, congratulations on solving this. It's just terrific work!

I'd really appreciate your thoughts. Thank you SO SO much!

Sorry, one more thing as I re-read you last post; I'm not quite sure I understand this.

YOU SAID: if you want, either use the features in iTunes that make files reflect their metadata, or use a custom script to relocate files to a location based on your rules, and keep iTunes connected to the file.

ME: What features in iTunes makes files reflect their metadata? Do you just mean if I change artwork, or change the name of the genre or even artist or something within the Get Info window? And the custom script to relocate files based on my rules is the CustomRenamer script?

Thanks!

Is the script for the album artwork the "CleanDeadArt" one? As before, any instructions on the order of how to work this script is very much appreciated. And did you say that I should not run this if I have folders with many different files, not in the typical Artist/Album setup? For example, as mentioned before, folder 1700s could have a couple of Springsteen tracks from Born to Run, then 500 series could have a couple, and 900 might have the rest. It's a hodgepodge I realize. I'll get to that structure. Anything that can help expedite it will be great!

Sorry for the multiple notes. I'm just going back over things. Thank you so much.

One more question: it is much easier to navigate in 10.7. Is there any advantage/disadvantage to staying in this version while I do the converting and upgrading these files - and then getting into the artist/album structure?

also - is the 10.7 version somehow related to it not finding other songs in a folder that changed that I mentioned? My intent is to do bulk number of songs in a folder. Moving them out. Adding the new ones. Then have iTunes find the new location. But today I had to do one at a time. It used to work, even with 10.7. This is critically important. Perhaps I'm not doing something right but it seems pretty simple.

Thanks as always. Again, sorry for the number of messages.

That is TOTALLY fine. I appreciate you letting me know.

I'm working on fine-tuning some other things as this progress continues (making Artist/Album folders in an all-new setup for example). (If there's a quicker way to create Windows Explorer Artist/Album folders from iTunes, that would be great haha).

Rest up. You've done just great work here and I deeply appreciate it.

Look forward to your replies when time permits.

Thanks!

Oh, gotcha. I don't think it has anything to do with the dBpoweramp because that has only recently been introduced into my system but I do see that name at the bottom of the capture I sent. In fact, if I highlight the cursor on files from a few years ago, it also shows dB underneath the information about the song and I only recently installed it (at the suggestion of HD Tracks - a reputable service that sells hi-res files from record labels). I checked to see if this program was running in my windows start-up (msconfig) but I don't see it there. I actually set a restore point a couple of weeks ago when I installed that and I'm thinking of going back so it's not installed and see what happens.

As for recent conversion (other than testing the AIFF, Lossless, FLAC and so forth - which I did use dB for), this is the program I use to convert wav to MP3:

In fact, it's the one I used for many of the MP3s that were converted from wav.

And your comment about the deleted file having information more than you'd usually see, I'm wondering about that myself.

Do you have a conversion program that you could recommend? I'm using full capability on a 21 day free trial on dB and it has about 7 days left. Despite that issue, I still do need to get all these art images out of the folders using your script.

YOU SAID: Or you can use my script to gather the same content into a new folder, e.g. X:\Artwork where X: is the drive your library is on, so that you can review what has been pulled out before you delete it. In its current form it leaves Folder.jpg files behind. I could add an option to remove those too if you want.

ME: Do you have an idea of when you might be able to do that?

Thank you so much!!

YOU SAID: Even if Windows is currently showing the wrong artwork for an album that you're going to upgrade after using the ExportImport process the new copy should have the right image embedded in it.

As noted previously I can cook up a script to automatically embed the current iTunes artwork of selected tracks so you can fix the artwork issues in advance of the upsampling project if you wish.

ME: I'm confused for sure. I definitely know how to run your script to replace the 160 files. I wanted to get through pruning songs out and adding as much missing Artwork as I could before doing this en masse. That said, are you saying that when I do convert to the higher quality and then replace the 160 that the upgraded versions, Windows will should have the right image embedded in it (without me having to go song-by-song to do as you suggested above)?

If you can get a script to automatically embed the current iTunes artwork, that's great. But what's confusing is it seems you're saying if I replace the 160 with the lossless file(s), the artwork will fix itself in windows? But then you're saying you could make a script to automatically fix artwork in advance of the upsampling project?

Can you clarify? Whichever gets me to my goal is what I'm hoping for.

BTW, do you have ANY idea of why so many songs have this one image on it? And how I can get them right?

BTW - The capture above is in a temporary folder where I convert wav to MP3 over the months and years. I then use ID3 tagging and then after that, I copy into the Windows folder where they'll reside. I then import them in iTunes. I don't think that matters but thought I'd ask.

Thanks!

Thank you so much!