Organising your music for new ipods, itunes users

B

Bang Diddley

Well-known member
To cut a long story sort I’m moving to ipod/itunes, I’ve never used either before and need a bit of advice. All my music is on an external drive (1) which I back up to another external drive (2). I use a file structure and I just copy stuff to and fro to a small Sansa listening while on the move.

I’m quite happy with the above but now have an ipod with enough capacity to hold all my music. Ill just leave the ipod plugged into the hi-fi so I don’t need to listen through the PC/external drive. But I got some newbie questions.

Can I use itunes with a file structure ?

Can itunes be used with my external drive (1) as I don’t want to copy all the tunes onto my PC.
What if I plug in another drive external drive(2) or my Sansa which my PC sees as an external drive. Will itunes freak out ?

Most all my music is ripped from my own CDs so album, artist and song title etc is tagged using Exact Audio Copy but don’t have album art, how can I get this without retagging the whole lot ?

I thought about just retagging the whole lot with mp3tag as it would download the album art for me. I tried it on a handful of mp3s and it did the tagging bit ok but started to rename the actual file name and losing the track sequence number. Eg filename ‘01 artist – song title’ became ‘artist song title’. Maybe I just did it wrong . . .
 
nomos

nomos

Administrator
Let's see here...

Bang Diddley said:
Can I use itunes with a file structure ?
Click to expand...
Go to iTunes Preferences > Advanced. To keep your own file structure, uncheck 'Keep iTunes folder organized.' To prevent iTunes from duplicating all of you files into its own folder, uncheck 'Copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library.' Now you can import all of your music into the iTunes database (just drag and drop the music folders into the left column, under 'Library') without duplicating or disrupting your existing file structure.

Bang Diddley said:
Can itunes be used with my external drive (1) as I don’t want to copy all the tunes onto my PC.
What if I plug in another drive external drive(2) or my Sansa which my PC sees as an external drive. Will itunes freak out ?
Click to expand...
I haven't done this but there are instructions online for keeping your iTunes library on an external drive. I'm not sure what iTunes would do if you removed the drive while it's running. But it would just ignore unrelated drives and players.

Bang Diddley said:
Most all my music is ripped from my own CDs so album, artist and song title etc is tagged using Exact Audio Copy but don’t have album art, how can I get this without retagging the whole lot ?
Click to expand...
If you right click on a file (or multiples) in iTunes you get an option to download album artwork from the iTunes store. That's the easiest way. If it can't find anything, just select the relevant tracks, right click > Get Info > Artwork, then drag in whatever you've been able to find on Google images [/QUOTE]

Hope that helps ;)
 
STN

STN

sou'wester
I have a probably stupid question about this.

I have an iphone4, which is synced to a small playlist in my wider iTunes library. I chop and change what's on this playlist quite a lot cos the phone doesn't hold that many tunes. The problem is that there's one album that won't go away and seems to stay on my phone no matter what. It's definitely not on the computer playlist that's synced to the ipod, and nor is it on any playlists that I've set up on the ipod. What's causing this and how can I get rid of it? This isn't urgent, it's not The Best of Skrewdriver or anything like that, but it's irking me.
 
nomos

nomos

Administrator
That's a strange one. The only thing I can think of would be to turn off syncing and see if you can get rid of it manually. That or reset your iphone, but that's a small pain.
 
you

you

Well-known member
Proper newb question

shit, im posting in all the threads tonight, glad I found this though - I have a newbie I tunes question.

After switching computers emac to imac I have two hard drives full of music and an external hard drive full of music.

I'd like to store and back-up all my stuff in one ( well two ) place(s) - IF i buy a 1TB HD, and move everything onto it can I use it as my go to itunes library - I know I can select an outside source - would it be ok to leave the thing plugged in whilst I power down, standby and sleep my main iMac? I dont want to have to faff pluggin it in every day.

second question - what's the best way to back up? a second 1TB HD? Before I just saved a load to DVDs.... but it's hard to keep track of what you have and what still needs to be backed up....
 
B

Bang Diddley

Well-known member
nomos said:
Let's see here...

If you right click on a file (or multiples) in iTunes you get an option to download album artwork from the iTunes store. That's the easiest way. If it can't find anything, just select the relevant tracks, right click > Get Info > Artwork, then drag in whatever you've been able to find on Google images

Hope that helps ;)
Click to expand...

Nearly there Paul, iTunes doesn't recognise artwork tagged by the mp3tag/EAC software that I had used previously cos iTunes keeps it in own specific directory and ignores the tagged info so now I have to do it all again using iFumes.:mad:
 
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blacktulip

blacktulip

Pregnant with mandrakes
Another question, not completely unrelated:

I'm a heavy FLAC user, and employ VLC for playback. All is peachy besides the lack of a decent iTunes-styled library incorporating artist/album/title fields and a search facility. Anyone have any suggestions?
 
N

Numbers

Well-known member
Converting them to Apple Lossless is quite a hassle, but if you own any other devices from Cupertino it's the most rewarding one. Not in iTunes = no sync, simple as that.

If you just want to play the flac-files on your mac, though, you could try Fluke (http://code.google.com/p/flukeformac/) or Cog (http://cogx.org/index.php). The latter is a lo-fi iTunes-like application that is friendlier with open source formats.
 
blacktulip

blacktulip

Pregnant with mandrakes
Fluke sounds like the one. I'm after Mac->DAC->amp only. Cheers!

m99188868 said:
Converting them to Apple Lossless is quite a hassle, but if you own any other devices from Cupertino it's the most rewarding one. Not in iTunes = no sync, simple as that.

If you just want to play the flac-files on your mac, though, you could try Fluke (http://code.google.com/p/flukeformac/) or Cog (http://cogx.org/index.php). The latter is a lo-fi iTunes-like application that is friendlier with open source formats.
Click to expand...
 
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