Why does iTunes change my file names

Amp2140 wrote:

Check and see if you have organize music checked under edit-> preferences-> advanced, maybe if it leaves it where you put it, it won't change it.

Hi, you have it the wrong way around. Checking that option lets iTunes rearrange the tracks. Leaving it clear allows you to use your own filename & folder structure.

tt2

Not a clue, perhaps it is just not very good, or it has some feature where you thought you were clearing tracks from the interface which actually deleted them.

tt2

Another question for tt2.

Suppose I manage to get the artist and name fields correct via the "get info" route and later upgrade my ipod touch to iOS 5.1 from 4.2.

I'm told I'll have to reload all my songs.

Will the corrected artist and name entries be used or will I be required to do all that work again? 😟

Thanks.

Mike

An iOS update will normally leave the media in place, though if the normal update fails you may find you need to restore the device and reload all the content. Either way, as long as your media is in your library that isn't a problem. Once you've updated the tags they should stay updated, even if you remove the tracks from the library and then add them back in again.

If your files currently have the file name format of <Artist> - <Title> I can probably save you a bit of typing by modifying my TagFromFilename script. The version there expects to find files in the form <Album Artist>\<Album>\## <Name>[ - <Artist>] from which it can rebuild all the significant values needed to organize albums in iTunes. Unless you've missed out some details however, your pattern is a bit shy on details. You might want to try using something like MusicBrainz Picard to scan, identify and update the tags. MediaMonkey is also able to do some useful Filename<>Tag manipulations and can lookup album data from Amazon's database. If you edit tags with a third party tool you then have to persuade iTunes to read any changes, either by playing every track briefly or using my UpdateTagInfo script.

tt2

To tt2 : Thank you for your reply. I'm now all straightened out. I had MediaMonkey but had not used it.

Your language skills seem to match your computer skills. It is a pleasure to read your well-written posts.

Thanks again.

To Papa: Your misery may soon be ended.

I used MediaMonkey to repair the name field of the song tags. It's better than iTunes for this.

I tried to sync my iPod touch with MediaMonkey but ended up goig back to iTunes where I deleted all of my music and re-loaded it from the repaired files. Then instead of 1000 mangled artist names I had only about 30.

I repaired those with iTunes.

Aaaah ...... there's peace in the valley.

Everything is as it should be.

Good luck, and thanks for starting this thread.

Mike

Hi Papa,

I'm not an expert in this field but most of the following should be correct.

When a track is ripped from a CD, in addition to the music of the song an additional set of data called a tag is inserted in the song file. There are several different formats. The tag includes the artist name, song title, album title,track number and other info. For my purposes and, I think, yours, the artist name and the song title fields are the only important ones.

iTunes fetches the song title and artist from the tag, ignoring the name of the file.

Your tags are missing, damaged or just wrong.

Also, if your song file is shown as "Beatles - Help" the tag could be empty or could call the artist Beatles, beatles, The Beatles, the beatles, "Beatles, The", or many other possibilities. iTunes sees each of these as a different artist and gives you several different names for the same group. Messy!

To repair the tags download MediaMonkey at http://www.mediamonkey.com/.

Load into MediaMonkey a group of song files.

Under "Tools" select "Auto-tag from filename".

For filename format select <Artist> - <Title>.

Click OK.

Done.

If this doesn't work:

Select all of the songs by the Beatles.

Click "Edit".

In "Artist(s)" enter "Beatles. Or, even easier, select "Beatles" from the drop-down list.

Click "OK".

You may have to repair the song titles. Maybe not.

Now iTunes will load all of these files correctly.

Well .......it did for me.

You can try to use MediaMonkey to sync your iPod instead of using iTunes. Their site says it does a better job.

I repaired the files that iTunes at first couldn't process correctly (about 1000) in about two hours.

Good luck.

Mike

A HUGE THANKS to you and OP.

my lament: I switched to Mac 4 years ago [after 20 years PC],

and STILL my mp3s are in such disarray [compared to old school) 😮

Not being able to clearly articulate the issue to anyone who cared about these details [nor why this was such a problem for me] was very frustrating. so, even though I lack the time/energy to fix this issue for 120GB of songs, it makes me feel better to know that at least two people 'get my pain'!

[i miss my CDs; they tended to stay put, where i last put them; ditto my old Dell, stuff stayed where I put it; 😕 finding songs was so easy. said this old person.😉]

thanks!

Hi, not sure as yet what exactly you want to change, but if you're running on Mac Doug's Scripts has many options for manipulating tags & files in iTunes.

tt2

Thanks. I really appreciate the responses.

again, i think this is over my head to comprehend, sorry.😊

i skimmed Doug's, enough to beleive this is a very complex issue.

and as my understanding is superficial, i fear i will make a mess which can never be fixed if i used the wrong script to fix the wrong thing? could i be more vague? sorry for my ignorance. 😕

and now that i have 120GB of music files, i think it's just too late [way too cumbersome to clean up]

in essence, i wanted ONE folder per artist, with ONE folder per album. [and i guess just one folder per 'CD']

i now see that what is ideal for my needs is 'crude', but it works better for me than the highly refined tag system.... if Herbie does a Joni tribute, i don't want a separate folder for each song on the album, even though there are myriad artists on that album .... and now i understand that some people do.

i wish mac would give me a choice, a say in the matter. Dell was better at saying 'here's what we are going to do; if that's not ok with you, pick somethign else now'

If I understand msandrin's posts, my Music on my Dell [circa 2002! cannot recall what software, but not iTUNEs] was organized by the mp3 filename .... everything was where i expected it to be, organized by artist/albums/tunes ...... folders of 'unknowns' were a rare event; life was easy. simple. and it ws easy to make adjustments.

whereas now on the Mac things are organized based upon information in the ID3 tags [and that this info is not uniformly present, for reasons i cannot comprehend😕] and that on a Mac, tags trump filenames? but not always? still not clear on that.

somehow, when i ported over from the Dell to the Mac, mac rearranged everything and i had a big mess;

it seems that on the Dell, eg, i had one folder for the Beatles [or one for the carpenters] and within that folder a separate folder for each album, with all the tunes for that album within that folder. ah, the number of folders matched the number of physical CDs. comforting. but i may be wrong about this. seeing the past through rose colored glasses and all.

Now i have about seven folders for 'the Beatles' [but they all have different names and some are even album names; ditto carpenters] and each folder needs to be opened to figure out within which one of these a particular album of interest resides. far more folders than actual CDs. ugh. seriously?

to analogize, in my kitchen, i have objects related to 'baking' in say one cupboard and one drawer .... a quick glance into those two locations and i can instantly see the object i am looking for, even if i cannot recall it's name, or color, or precise shape. I know that out of say a possible 20 cupboards/drawers, i only need to rummage through 2 places and it will be where i last put it. Until i read this thread, it always felt that Mac was saying to me 'forget your system, we know better; we are just going to dump all your objects somewhere in that kitchen of yours and we will comingle baking and cooking and sewing supplies, and when you need an object, just tell us it's name and we will search for it for you [really reaally fast, much faster than Dell ever could, i have to admit] and spit it out on command.' well, the problem with that is that I don't always remember the name, and how am i to know if we are using the english spelling or German or Asian? i know, it depends upon in which era/reign the object was acquired. a whisk in one language is a broom in another!

similiarly, voice memos on my ipod, go somewhere on this mac [maybe first to itunes and then to hard drive? cna't figure it out], they receive some kind of label which may or may not be date related?, then i have to edit them in itunes to something meaningful, then figure out where they reside on the hard drive, go change those names to match up.... it's very confusing for me, this library database stuff. and when syncing happens, it's not crystal clear to me who's the master and who's the slave [or, do they change roles??? ]

on the dell, it was a manual drag and drop thing from one locus on mp3 player to one other location and there they stayed until I decided to put them elsewhere. sure. it was not super fast, but it was easy to comprehend. for me.

an automatic transmission is a great thing, dont get me wrong; but i sure miss my 1969 VW stick shift and double shifting in curves ...i always new what gear i was in and how much power i could count on ....with the Caddy, who knows? a false sense of control, I know, but...big sigh....

i no longer have the time/energy to fix this manually; and i'm not smart enough to figure out how to pre-test that the scripts are automatically doing what i would want.

anyways, thanks for helping me to slightly better understand why things are such a mess on my Mac. mystery solved. acceptance is surely around the bend.

in essence, i wanted ONE folder per artist, with ONE folder per album. [and i guess just one folder per 'CD']

Generally setting a common Album title and Album Artist will fix things.

For deeper problems and background see Grouping tracks into albums.

tt2

As I recall it you had a slightly different, and non-standard requirement, and then trashed all the tags that are there to help you keep order. 😕

As to why it needs fixing at all, the main problem is that iTunes relies on the CDDB database which doesn't populate Album Artist and often incorrectly sets the compilation flag. This leads to albums breaking up when guest artists are listed, or some albums by an artist appearing in a different area of the library. Then add in the problems of occasional mispellings, whether or not to include "The" as part of some bands' names, inconsistent approaches to the use of sort fields and the naming of multiple disc recordings etc. and it is easy to create a mess. It doesn't usually take me more than a few moments to tweak each album that I import to iTunes for the best results, but starting from a disordered state is always a challenge. Compare to inserting a book into shelves already ordered by author and title, to the task of getting randomly ordered books into that order.

tt2