Corrupt Song Metadata - Way to Recover?

Question

Corrupt Song Metadata - Way to Recover?

My iTunes library metadata is all messed up. Is there any sort of app (or other process) that can recursively go through the library, identify a song (sample it?) and then update the metadata?

Here is what happened (I think). I posted this on iTunes Match community but did not get any replies.

I subscribed to iTunes Match when it first went public. I used it for about 3 months and decided to discontinue - this was the last I thought about Match until recently. Not long after discontinuing Match, I noticed that some of my iTunes album art was not longer there. I didn't think much of this. Recently, I have noticed that I can no longer find some of my iTunes music by Track. I did some further investigation and discovered that much of my iTunes metadata is corrupt. I did some searches of the forum, and discovered that there were some early problems with Match that trashed metadata. The remedy seemed to be restoring from backups, and other sources IF you noticed the problem right away - which does not characterize my situation. As it stands today, all my old backups are long gone, and my metadata is really broken. Is there anything I can do to recover and/or recreate my metadata (a cool app, some other fix)? I have 1000's of songs from a myriad of sources. Thanks!

Posted on Nov 21, 2015 7:22 AM

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Answer 1

Limnos

Level 10

411,187 points

Nov 21, 2015 7:49 AM in response to John Cotterill

According to one blog I read a while ago Match itself does this. It uses an audio fingerprint to identify tracks which is why you can't just take a track and name it anything and have a match come up for the name alone. The only other program I have heard of doing this is MusicBrainz but I don't know if it is still viable. You might find something with a web search (which is how I would have to do it).

iTunes gets tags from two places. One is the database (.itl) library file. These get assigned from tags in the actual media files. Editing labels results in the edits being written to both the database and the media file. So the question arises have the media files been changed too, or is it simply the database has been corrupted?

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Answer 2

Nov 26, 2015 9:45 AM in response to Limnos

Hi Limmos,

Thanks for the response - sorry for the delay, I've been away from the computer...

I know how to check the ID tags in the media file, how do I verify what is in the .itl library? Is the library info what is displayed in iTunes?

One other thing that I just noticed on my iPhone. I have at least one song that I can see fine when I select 'Songs'. Everything looks great. My artwork is there, the album title is correct, and so is the song title. However, when I select 'Albums' the song/album do not show up.

And, just to make it clear. My iTunes library 'master' is on my iMac. I load up my iPhone from the iMac.

Thanks!

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