ITUNES UNKNOWN ALBUM/ARTIST ERROR

Are your songs in .wav format? These files lack a tag, and if imported to a new library iTunes will pick the filename as a track title but otherwise see blank metadata, which it treats as unknown artist and unknown album for the artist and album fields. If you clone the entire iTunes folder from one computer to the other then you should see exactly the same library. If you only copy the media folder, then import it, you are more likely to have issues. Both AIFF and Apple Lossless (smaller) can hold tags so these are better containers for lossless media than .wav.

See Move your iTunes library to a new computer for more.

tt2

rickytangalang wrote:

can iTunes automatically search for tags once converted to aiff?

No. See Move your iTunes library to a new computer if you still have the library working on the older computer. Or you could convert to AIFF or Apple Lossless there and then transfer the new copies. If those options aren't available then you're going to have to repair the damage by hand again.

tt2

Don't use .wav as an audio format for iTunes. Convert anything you've already ripped into Apple Lossless.

See Make a split library portable to get your iTunes library in the right shape for moving.

See Move your iTunes library to a new computer when the time comes to move it.

tt2

Ricky,

Are these files still in WAV format? You can't write metadata tags onto WAV files, so they'll always be vulnerable to this kind of problem.

When you moved your iTunes library, did you drag the entire iTunes folder — including all subfolders and files, notably the crucial database file, iTunes Library.itl — from the old computer to the new one?

Edit: Ooops! Sorry, didn't see tt2's reply.

It should be easy enough to Show Exact Duplicates once the new copies have been created, sort by kind, then select and delete the .wavs.

tt2