JimmyNeutron
Super Member
Hope this helps:
I just recently bought a 120 gig Classic. I've never used iTunes. All my music is in an external drive, mostly as FLAC, but some MP3's as well. Over the years I've used various programs to tag, catagorize, and download cover art for my music. Now, when I started using iTunes I had all sorts of trouble just pointing it to the proper folder on the proper drive. It seemed iTunes only wanted to look at the iTunes folder and import everything into there. I also had the dreaded double-song phenomena most people are having. I spent 3 frackin' days just trying to figure this software out. It *should* be easier!!!
Well, it was easier. It was all my fault. iTunes really is a great music organizer.......ONLY after you understand it. Here's the deal. Your entire music catalog HAS TO BE TAGGED EXACTLY AND PROPERLY. Yeah, I thought mine was tagged properly. I spent countless days and months using other software to do just that for me. The problem was that all that other software actually created duplicate files, tagged wrong ( ex. When Dream and Day Unite is NOT the same as When Dream And Day Unite ). Any misspelling of letters, spaces, symbols will cause iTunes to show a new folder for just that one song over the rest in the album. This was very frustrating. Well, knowing that my music was all tagged wrong in some form or fashion I decided to just start fresh. I made a second folder on my external drive and labled it "iPod music". Here I put only the CD's that I actually want on my iPod - ie, only the music I want iTunes to see. I then, in iTunes, slected to not import, tag, or manage my music, or to auto-organize it. I then selected the new iPod Music folder for my iTunes. Itunes now imports and shows all the music in that folder - and it showed a LOT of double files. I manually looked at every folder in my new iPod music folder and guess what I found? Yep, double, even triple entries. But I also found that some artist names were misspelled, as were some songs. All these created double entries in iTunes because iTunes treated them as a unique artist. I can only guess that these were created long ago by some other programs I used for tagging, etc.
Now, iTunes is great in that you can manually correct EVERYTHING you need to for your music right from the iTunes window. I selected "album list" view. I then hilighted every song in that CD and right clicked and selected "get info", then just re-typed the artist name and the name of the CD. BOOM! iTunes retagged the whole CD correctly. I selected "Get artwork" and BOOM! iTunes tagged it with cover art. Whatever CD's it could not get cover art for I could easily copy/paste into the "cover" box in the "Get info" section. Easy! I also had to manually delete all double songs directly from within my iPod music folder. All this took me 4 days to do, but it was a one time deal. You just have to be very organized with your music collection. iTunes really is pretty easy to use. Just remember, it's a dumb program, meaning it doesn't know the difference in double songs, double artists, etc unless YOU tell it so. It only shows you EXACTLY what's in your folders - misspellings and all. My eyes, at a glance, could not find a lot of things like capital letters or non capital letters, missing or extra spaces. But once I saw them in the "album list" view in iTunes it all became alot clearer.
Now when I use Cover Flow in my iPod every cd is displayed with correct album art and the correct number of songs - no more double albums with 2 songs on one and the remaining on another. It's all perfect now. Just make sure to check EVERYTHING.
Hope this helps.
Jimmy
I just recently bought a 120 gig Classic. I've never used iTunes. All my music is in an external drive, mostly as FLAC, but some MP3's as well. Over the years I've used various programs to tag, catagorize, and download cover art for my music. Now, when I started using iTunes I had all sorts of trouble just pointing it to the proper folder on the proper drive. It seemed iTunes only wanted to look at the iTunes folder and import everything into there. I also had the dreaded double-song phenomena most people are having. I spent 3 frackin' days just trying to figure this software out. It *should* be easier!!!
Well, it was easier. It was all my fault. iTunes really is a great music organizer.......ONLY after you understand it. Here's the deal. Your entire music catalog HAS TO BE TAGGED EXACTLY AND PROPERLY. Yeah, I thought mine was tagged properly. I spent countless days and months using other software to do just that for me. The problem was that all that other software actually created duplicate files, tagged wrong ( ex. When Dream and Day Unite is NOT the same as When Dream And Day Unite ). Any misspelling of letters, spaces, symbols will cause iTunes to show a new folder for just that one song over the rest in the album. This was very frustrating. Well, knowing that my music was all tagged wrong in some form or fashion I decided to just start fresh. I made a second folder on my external drive and labled it "iPod music". Here I put only the CD's that I actually want on my iPod - ie, only the music I want iTunes to see. I then, in iTunes, slected to not import, tag, or manage my music, or to auto-organize it. I then selected the new iPod Music folder for my iTunes. Itunes now imports and shows all the music in that folder - and it showed a LOT of double files. I manually looked at every folder in my new iPod music folder and guess what I found? Yep, double, even triple entries. But I also found that some artist names were misspelled, as were some songs. All these created double entries in iTunes because iTunes treated them as a unique artist. I can only guess that these were created long ago by some other programs I used for tagging, etc.
Now, iTunes is great in that you can manually correct EVERYTHING you need to for your music right from the iTunes window. I selected "album list" view. I then hilighted every song in that CD and right clicked and selected "get info", then just re-typed the artist name and the name of the CD. BOOM! iTunes retagged the whole CD correctly. I selected "Get artwork" and BOOM! iTunes tagged it with cover art. Whatever CD's it could not get cover art for I could easily copy/paste into the "cover" box in the "Get info" section. Easy! I also had to manually delete all double songs directly from within my iPod music folder. All this took me 4 days to do, but it was a one time deal. You just have to be very organized with your music collection. iTunes really is pretty easy to use. Just remember, it's a dumb program, meaning it doesn't know the difference in double songs, double artists, etc unless YOU tell it so. It only shows you EXACTLY what's in your folders - misspellings and all. My eyes, at a glance, could not find a lot of things like capital letters or non capital letters, missing or extra spaces. But once I saw them in the "album list" view in iTunes it all became alot clearer.
Now when I use Cover Flow in my iPod every cd is displayed with correct album art and the correct number of songs - no more double albums with 2 songs on one and the remaining on another. It's all perfect now. Just make sure to check EVERYTHING.
Hope this helps.
Jimmy
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