How To: Fix iTunes

Filed under: Audio, Fun, Utilities, Windows, Podcasting, Apple, Freeware, How-Tos

How To: Fix iTunes

by Jason Clarke Nov 24th 2005

It took quite a while for me to come around, but iTunes eventually changed the way that I listen to music (and download podcasts) on my PC. I was a long, long, long time WinAmp user, and until iTunes released a version that minimized to my system tray, and I could find a way to control iTunes with keyboard shortcuts, I wasn’t interested. Well, the first problem was dealt with a while ago, and for my second problem I found iTunesKeys, a program dedicated to solving iTunes’ woefully missing keyboard shortcut access. But, after using iTunes for awhile, I realized that while Apple has given us an incredibly elegant and fun to use media player, its developers suffer from some serious delusions that iTunes users will never make mistakes, or decide to delete songs. I can’t quite fathom why you would have an application show a [!] symbol when it finds a missing file, yet offer no way to actually remove the reference to that missing file.

Enter idleTunes. idleTunes was made for people who love iTunes, but wish that it would just:

Find and insert album artwork into tracks
Copy iTunes playlists to any MP3 player
Export iTunes playlists as M3U, PLS, or B4S
Remove "dead" tracks from your library
Create playlists for all of the albums in your library
Create playlists for all of the artists in your library
Delete user playlists

By far the coolest feature of idleTunes is the way that it makes iTunes compatible with non-iPod portable music players, including intelligently renaming files when copying a playlist onto a screenless flash player to ensure the play order stays intact. Brilliant! And did I mention it’s free?

Finally, no post about how to fix iTunes would be complete without some directions on how to clean up your library and get consistent ID3 tags. For that, I'll direct you to Connected Internet, who has a great primer on how to use MusicBrainz Tagger to rationalize your music collection. It takes some time, but MusicBrainz makes it as quick and painless as it can be, and the results are definitely worth it.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

Resource said 9:55AM on 11-24-2005

After a lull this site has come back strong.
You guys are pointing out some pretty useful stuff recently.
Keep it up.

geek2us said 11:10AM on 11-24-2005

Awesome man....juse awesome :)
Happy thanksgiving all!
http://www.geek2us.net
Coffee

Everton said 1:11PM on 11-24-2005

Great article on tidying up iTunes. Even better when I realised it has a link to my site at the bottom :-) I've got so much traffic for the article and links from other sites it is obviously a hot topic. I think it's amazing that Apple haven't realised this and made it easier for users to manage music collections and tags directly in iTunes, rather than having to use other utilities.

metric152 said 1:26PM on 11-24-2005

A really good program on osx to clean up your mp3s is Media Rage. I used it to organize my collection. It will also find cover art. http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MediaRage.html

Jose said 1:32PM on 11-24-2005

This is nice I was waiting for someone to create this, but I'm still waiting for the "WATCH FOLDER" option from Winamp, any app for iTunes to do this??
I guess not many people use that option, hope idleTunes will add it some day..

met said 3:59PM on 11-24-2005

My songs got messed up when I copied them from to my powerbook and back to my Dell laptop. Now most of them don't play on WindowsMediaPlayer (says the headers are compressed format or something). Also they don't play on some mp3 players. They play good on VLC on the PC (didn't try iTunes - I am sure it will work).

iTunes did something to those songs. Can it be reversed?

Can someone point me to a solution?

Everton said 4:22PM on 11-24-2005

Zach Forrester said 5:40PM on 11-24-2005

After reading your headline, I thought the article was going to Address how Rogers has actually broken iTunes
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1219783#1219783

Ryan said 3:59AM on 11-25-2005

"I can�t quite fathom why you would have an application show a [!] symbol when it finds a missing file, yet offer no way to actually remove the reference to that missing file."

The backspace key, perhaps? Or Edit->Clear? Both work to remove dead entries in the library on the OS X version.

scott said 4:12AM on 11-25-2005

"I can�t quite fathom why you would have an application show a [!] symbol when it finds a missing file, yet offer no way to actually remove the reference to that missing file."

have you tried selecting the offending entry and pressing 'delete'?

Fabian said 4:47AM on 11-25-2005

I think the option to make iTunes work with just about any MP3-player is great. Now I can use iTunes even to sync my lousy little 20-bucks-player :-)

Also the remove dead entry automatism sounds quite useful. I'm really looking forward to it.

Moof said 6:43AM on 11-25-2005

Actually it's very easy to edit tags in iTunes. Use the search function to bring up the relevant files (or choose them manually - whatever) mark them all, right click them and choose get info. Now you're editing all the tracks at the same time. Of course you shouldn't change the track name since that would change the track name on all songs.

Oh, and the !-references are obviously for when you have your iTunes library spread across removable drives. It shows you the song files aren't where iTunes expects them to be. And as it has already been pointed out it's easy to remove them. Of course by far the easiest and most convenient way to use iTunes is to let it manage your library entirely. That way you just choose to remove files from iTunes and you can move them to trash directly from there. If you don't let iTunes manage your library you're only getting half the benefits.

As for creating playlists of all albums on the computer.. that's about the silliest thing I've ever heard. Put iTunes in browse mode (the eye thingy on the top left), click on an artist name, genre or album name and you instantly have a playlist right there at the bottom.

wulf said 9:24AM on 11-25-2005

"As for creating playlists of all albums on the computer.. that's about the silliest thing I've ever heard."

Unless you're syncing to an iPod which is not big enough to hold the entire collection, in which case it's quite a sensible way to manage things.

Allan Rojas said 9:33AM on 11-25-2005

Two basic things I'm still missing in iTunes are the possibility of placing songs in Queue, like Winamp does... and of course, a quicker Jump function, again like Winamp.

I made a small app in C# a while ago for handling Queues in iTunes, but it wasn't integrated inside the player...

http://www.naivepixel.com/articles/109/queue-in-itunes--iqueue

Cheers!

warped said 9:55AM on 11-25-2005

I've been using exTray for iTunes hotkeys and track notification. I love it!

You can get it at http://www.extendedtools.com/extray/extray.htm

Dave M. said 11:40AM on 11-25-2005

Ryan, scott: Sure, you can delete the offending entries easily enough. However, if you have well over 20,000 tracks like I do, 10 missing entries are very hard to find. If iTunes allowed you to sort the column that has the "!" in it, it would be a ton easier to remove all the offending entries.

So until then, I'll use idleTunes!

cuby said 12:40PM on 11-25-2005

i was in the same situation as the author for a long time; itunes had some features i really adored, but i wasn't going to switch over until it could claim some basic functionality that it (amazingly) lacked. there are effective workarounds though.

for updating and managing the itunes library on windows i recommend the "iTunes Library Updater" at http://n.ethz.ch/~altery/ which is a tiny little project that does everything i needed it to do. automatically adds new songs, deletes songs that no longer exist, and cleans the whole mess up with just a few clicks. i've used it several times already and it has worked beautifully.

i'm not sure what the commotion is over getting itunes playlists to play on non-iPod players. i have a crappy little sandisk flash player, and i just open it up as a removeable drive, click on the itunes playlist i want to transfer over, select all the files and drag and drop from itunes to the target drive. i admit, i was surprised that works, but it does. so now, i just click on party shuffle and drag a bunch of random tracks to my tiny player, and i get shuffle functionality from a 35 dollar mp3 player. drag and drop works very predictably across itunes, it's worth playing with.

now if only someone would code a "now playing" feature for windows, to make the track name pop up in the status bar while i'm playing worms armageddon, my migration will be complete :)

Thought Cancer said 2:07PM on 11-25-2005

You know, I'm also a long, long, long time WinAmp user. When I bought my iPod, I installed iTunes with it, thinking that Apple would know best in designing software to interface with its own player. Unfortunately, I found iTunes to be a bloated, crippled media player that treated the user like a simpleton. 15 minutes of research later, I downloaded and installed ml_ipod for WinAmp. It does almost everything that is listed in the two add-on programs that you are reviewing here, and then some! Granted, it has a very clunky interface for doing ID3 edits, and album art search require a separate downloadable, but in the end, I end up with more control of the music with WinAmp. iTunes is just bloated, installs unnecessary services (since when does a media player need to run a system-level service?), and restricts what I can do with my own music. iTunes makes even less sense if you do not plan to buy music from their music store, instead choosing to put your own music and music acquired from other sources on the iPod. Just my two cents.

billybob1863 said 2:23PM on 11-25-2005

seems 2 be a decent program... been randomly dying on me though... but for a free version of the exTray thing it seems good... (who pays $12 for this s(@#* ???)now all that itunes needs is a faster search function and the queue function from winamp... i love the share music + myTunes combo w. itunes though... so much gr8 music fast :P

Clifford Caoile said 7:52PM on 11-25-2005

That iTunesKeys is pure gold. (idleTunes garners a "meh", but the fault lies squarely on iTunes's underpowered API).

Try this for iTunesKeys:

Set a button for showing the current track info in a popup, say Control+NumPad0, then set a button to rate the current file, say Control+NumPad1-5. Then hold down the control key, and press 0. Without letting go, check the song name, and press the num pad 1-5 to rate it and your stars shows up in real time on the popup. This is much better than right-clicking, if you're a keyboard power user.

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