dw32 wrote:
Hi Steve, you might want to handle this one offline.
Short story long: Back around 2006 I realised I could get all my hundreds of CDs onto an iPod, and manage them on a Mac. So I converted from Windows to Apple, and gave all my CDs to Oxfam.
Technically if you give away the discs you're not supposed to keep the rips from them... đ
Soon after Match was released I signed up. I had ~6600 tracks, many classical, which took a couple of weeks to upload. Soon after I found Match was replacing my Apple Lossless 256kbps tracks with 128kbps! I quickly stopped it, signed out of Match as best I could.
I don't use iTunes Match, but as I understand things it shouldn't touch your original media. It is supposed to match your existing songs with content in the store (if it can) in which case you get access to a 256k version of the track on demand from any of your devices, and if it can't find a match it is supposed to encode and upload a 256k version of your original track. Apple Lossless tracks are significantly higher bitrate than 256k.
Next I found Match was still active, downloading stuff to my tiny 16GB iPhone 4s. I didn't want any music there, I need 128GB for the whole lot. I guess I found a Setting to stop that.
So in early Jan I started repairs. First thing was to delete the trivial stuff from (i?)Cloud whic Match had downloaded to the iPhone. Then I started to work between my old Mbook, newer mbPro.
Then I found 902 tracks had been deleted. Unbelievably it also seemed missing from Time Capsule. I sent a post to one of your fora but it was deleted inside an hour.
Not "my" fora, Apple owns them, I'm a fellow user. Posts tend to get deleted for various breaches of the terms of use. You can find a link at the bottom of the page.
So more repair work, starting from iPad. This generated many many duplicates. Then I found stuff starting to vanish, eventually I saw it actually happening when I had several windows open.
Obviously too late to help now, but before commencing any clean up work it is wise to have a complete clone of the data you are working on. Then if something goes wrong you can restore the clone. If you've run into the original DeDuper thread you'll see there are several ways that duplicates can be created inside iTunes and depending on the type there is a danger that removing a duplicate deletes the only physical copy of a file. This is particularly dangerous when symbolic links or junctions are used to make the same file appear on more that one path.
Somewhere around this time I made a post, and en passent casually alluded to iTunes repair work. That post was deleted before the next morning.
Again one assumes a TOU issue.
So since then I've been trying to cleanup. Near the end of last week I'd got stuff copied to an external drive, so I removed ALL music from the mbp and over the last couple of days I began to rebuild a brand new iTunes on the mbp, en route painfully undoing all the "Part of a Compilation" checkmarks (took many hours). I started Time Machine and went to bed late last night. Today I finished the tedious NOT-compilation work, then added all the artists, in groups of up to about 8 at a time.
A smart playlist matching All the rules Compilation is true and Album Artist is not Various Artists should normally bring you most of the tracks that you don't want to be compilations. Cmd-A should select everything, Cmd-I should open Get Info, and you can adjust Part of a compilation from the Options tab.
File > Add Folder to Library will let you import everything in one go. No real benefit that I can see to doing it more slowly.
After I'd had a meal, I found the a Compilations folder had reappeared, with I don't know how many artists/albums in it.
iTunes will read the tags and move (if you're letting it do so) things accordingly. Reasons why tracks might be marked as compilations are given in my article on Grouping tracks into albums.
I realised months ago that Apple must reckon I'm a pirate, because of all the copying about that I was doing. But I assure you I am not, Steve. EVERY SINGLE ITEM in my library I'd bought and paid for. Mostly CDs, a lot of them from charity shops (I've stopped that now, I only find compilation CDs or too-popuar stuff nowadays), plus only a modest amount from the iTunes Store (and one from Amazon).
Not that I can speak for them, but Apple isn't interested. They have made their devices hard to use for casually copying media from one library to another, that's enough. They are not proactively inspecting people's libraries for content of unknown origin and deleting it. You can copy your files around to your heart's content. IfiTunes has mistakenly deleted files as it supposed to be reorganizing them then that is a bug in the software, or an issue with the wider OS, or hardware, or your understanding of how the software will react to the instructions you give it. But there is nothing personal involved.
So please please help Steve:
1. Tell Apple and/or their systems I am NOT a Pirate, I'm just trying fix up my library.
I don't have anyone to tell, but they're really not that interested and it has no bearing on your troubles.
2. Please tell me that all the stuff Apple has deleted is in the cloud? And there's a directory, like an iTunes Library.xml?
If your subscription to iTunes Match is still active you may be able to redownload the matched tracks, and you should have access to your past purchases. Visit Store > View Account > iTunes in the Cloud > Hidden Purchases > Manage to check for anything that might be hidden. Otherwise the answer is no. For reference the .xml file is a text based catalogue of the library that can be read by third party software. The .itl file is the core of the library. Neither contain your media.
3. How should I go about recovery?
Carefully! The user tip Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device has my general advice. Whatever you recover should probably go onto a separate drive, which you then backup to a different drive before attempting to populate a library with it. Make sure that your iTunes library folder is called iTunes and that it is using the media folder iTunes/iTunes Media. Your iTunes folder should normally be at the default path of <User's Music> or the root of another drive. I would normally recommend using the default preferences to "Keep..." and "Copy..."
If there is media that isn't stored on any of your devices and can no longer be found on your hard drives, then the last hope would be some form of unerase tool. Being mainly a Windows user I'm afraid I don't have any recommendations for OS X.
tt2
