Any software that can rebuild iTunes songs lost to Unknown Artist/ Unknown Album

Any chance you could scan through your Unknown Artist\Unknown Album folder looking for duplicates and throw some examples back at me. Filenames that are almost the same as another but end with " 1.<ext>", " 2.<ext>" etc. I'm just testing out a modification of my existing FindTracks script which makes it look for missing tracks in the Unknown Artist\Unknown Album folder as well as the usual locations. There's some fuzzy matching logic that needs fine tuning and it might help to see some real world examples.

tt2

Hmm, 20,000 songs in the one folder yes? I'll definately need to change the way the script looks for matches. Currently it processes every file name in the folder generating a fuzzy matching pattern. The overhead for testing a dozen files in the same folder isn't that great but 20,000 would be prohibitive.

tt2

Hi. Perhaps I'm not very good at explaining how the script is supposed to be operated for it to work, or my assumptions about where the files are and what file names they will have are way off. Give me a little time and I'll throw up some screenshots of my test scenario.

tt2

thelovelyman wrote:

The Script worked

Good to know. 🙂

... but the objective of getting the songs back in the approriate path ...Itunes/itunes Media/ Music/Artist/Album/song... has not been met.

Hmm, either you neglected the second bolded action from this part of my instructions...

I strongly recommend you disable the option to "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" for now. You can re-enable it once the script has done its work so that iTunes can reorganize the files back in their proper folders, then disable it again to avoid a similar problem in future.

... or the Unknown Artist\Unknown Album folder in question is not inside the currently designated iTunes Media folder.

Again ConsolidateByMoving can do much the same reorganization as iTunes would do, albeit more slowly, however it really scores when you want to move content into the media folder without leaving copies behind, or want to move the files out of the normal media folder, say Movies to a different external drive with spare room, or just want to avoid the kind of accident that you experienced at the outset...

tt2

Yes. I first tried it for one specific album, 12 tracks. Then another with just 7 tracks. Then tried it for just one song. All attempts generated the same message...

Also, I made sure it was not a cloud entry.

I've not been able to reproduce the problem at my end. Can you please download a fresh copy of the script and see if it still generates an error. I've made a few tweaks which may have helped. Otherwise let me know which line is now involved.

tt2

Are you sure you got a fresh copy of the script? Line 508 in the current version reads:

MsgBox "The function ""ExtFromKind"" needs updating to generate correct the extension for files of type:" & nl & K,0,Title

No mention of a variable T in that line so it ought not be possible for it to throw that error. (Although I see I need to swap two words around in that output! 😮)

Grab a fresh copy from this direct link: FindTracks

Line 4 should read: Version 1.0.1.14 - May 30th 2014

The second image doesn't reveal the full path to that folder, but assuming it is F:\Don New Itunes\iTunes\iTunes Music\Music\Unknown Artist\Unknown Album then that you have the correct media folder shown in the third image. The script should be capable of locating the files in the \Music\Unknown Artist\Unknown Album subfolder and matching on the basis of track number, name & file size.

tt2

Thanks, I sort of expected to get an error again, it was just trying to tie it down. Still couldn't force the error to occur at my end but I spotted the mistake in the code. Hopefully I've squashed it this time. Try FindTracksV15.

tt2

That did it! Thanks! The files are (almost) all connected back to their associated entries in Unknown Artist Unknown Album.

Per your info above, all I need to do to get folders created for artists and albums is to re-enable "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" or use ConsolidateByMoving,right?

Thanks again, awesome job!

Thanks, tt2. I was able to download the script and run it, but it only found 241 out of 4343 tracks (iTunes says there are 4454 tracks missing even after the script found some). I made sure the “Keep iTunes Medial Folder Organized” option was not checked. The folder path in my iTunes preferences is set to C:\Users\~\Music\iTunes. The folder structure for the songs I am attempting to find is iTunes\Music. The script seemed to find most of the songs in the Artists folders that are sitting directly in the Music folder (iTunes\Music\Artists\Albums), but I also have two other folders labeled CDs MP3 and Other Music Folders that contain the majority of my music. The file paths for these folders are iTunes\Music\CDs MP3\Artists and iTunes\Music\Other Music Folders\[Various Folders]\Artists. The script doesn’t appear to be finding any songs from these two folders. Am I doing something wrong with running the script? My understanding from your instructions was that the script should find songs that are in any sub-folder of the folder being searched. Do I need to move the songs in those two large folders to a different location?

Also, in case it matters I have just copied these files from an external hard drive on to a new computer, which is why iTunes can’t find most of them. Additionally, the files were running on a Mac, but my new computer is a PC.

Here is an example of what iTunes is showing for the location of a song vs. the actual location.

iTunes path: File:///Volumes/Seagate Backup Plus Drive/Music/iTunes Media Folder/Music/Beastie Boys/Ill Communication/01 Sure Shot.mp3

Actual file location: iTunes\Music\CDs MP3\Beastie Boys\Ill Communication\01-Sure Shot.mp3

Any additional guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks.

GoA