iTunes wants me to commit suicide (alternative, rock, mp3, dvd player)

[Molecules]

I'm not really hoping for anybody to shed light on this but it's been going on two years of hoarding digital music and I am finally paying the price.

I've got a pretty decent external hard-drive to back everything up, I had my iTunes copying all new files to it (of course preventing me from archiving the digital files the way I wanted to). This external hard-drive was set as my iTunes music folder.

I started up this morning to find that for whatever reason iTunes was a blank slate and I had to have it search all over again for mp3 files. I directed it to the hard-drive location folder. After half an hour all my music was back in the iTunes window except ALL the tag admendments I had made were gone, leaving me with hundreds of misnumbered, un-named music files, and ofcourse some random shit missing.

On top of this, when iCunt had decided to re-boot, it erased all of my iTunes playlist information. This was where I separated all of my music by genre and in the case of rock music, decade. I did this as I accumulated music and the rock-by-decades playlists (sixties, seventies etc) took many, many hours of scrolling and dragging.

I am livid and fed up, I knew I was putting too much stock in something so fleeting and material but it kept me sane. It's not the end of the world if you have a meaningful existence, which I don't, and at least the music is still there, I was just wondering if iTunes has screwed of many of you saps?

I imagine there are possible solutions - resetting the computer to a previous date, I also think iFuck saves and stores old library data but the thought of having to trawl the endless help forums again... I'd rather take a razor blade to my scrotum.

So, feel free to deposit your anti-iTunes bile in this shitty thread. And if anybody tells me I should have used winamp (been there, hated it), I will... make disparaging remarks about your relatives

[Guybrush]

I've never used ****unes and judging from the amount of crap I've heard about it, I can't see why others would (come on, you don't need iPoons to use your ipod) ..

I've had troubles with my music collection, though, but nothing so serious. One thing I do is that I have a lot of what I think is important in the filename.

C\Caravan\1970s\1973 - For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night [Studio album]

Then I use winamp which has a very convenient and obvious search bar. It searches for tags, but also for everything in the filename .. As you can see, that means that even if I somehow lose tags (everything I have is tagged of course), that album would still come up on a search like "caravan studio album" or "caravan 1970s" or, of course, just searching for the album name.

.. My advise to you now would be to get Winamp and, after installing that, Winamp essentials plugin pack ..

I've stayed away from iTunes, but I've tried some others. Winamp and MediaMonkey are two good alternatives, but for me - Winamp is clearly the easier, prettier and overall most comfortable to use.

In the library view, choose several files at a time, right click and choose "send to" and then -> auto tag.

It will take a while, but it should restore your file-tags for almost everything, perhaps except that studio session recording your friends had a couple of months ago. If you before that make sure that the files are not read-only, that information should be saved to the file rather than on some temporary database (Is this what your iCoons did?) and you shouldn't have to reexperience something like this.

[simplephysics]

That sounds horrible Molecules.
I've lost everything a few times and it's never fun.

[Guybrush]

Losing everything would mean literally days of careful cataloguing, downloading of album arts and other things I've done to keep my (amazing) collection immaculate .. I cope very well with mindless tasks (just look at the album review links collection) and so I've dedicated a lot of time to my music collection.

.. I keep a backup of the whole thing on an external HD :p

[jackhammer]

I will say it again and again and again. Back up your music onto DVD'S. They are cheap as chips and you get approx 40 albums onto a disc. Then you can just put it away in a cupboard and no that you have a back up that's easily stored.

If you need any albums molecules just holler and I will upload anything for ya.

[Guybrush]

DVDs may be good, but if you get well into 100GB and up towards 200GB for example, you're gonna need to burn a lot of DVDs ..

I have enough free space on my computer these days (almost 2 TB total) that I can actually keep an extra backup there as well.

[jackhammer]

Originally Posted by toretorden

DVDs may be good, but if you get well into 100GB and up towards 200GB for example, you're gonna need to burn a lot of DVDs ..

I have enough free space on my computer these days (almost 2 TB total) that I can actually keep an extra backup there as well.

I have done it as I have gone along so no need to convert and burn that much but for sure , it would be a pain to start from scratch. I also winzip my albums too and keep in a seperate folder so thats backed up again!

[Molecules]

ah. bless you lovely people. Cheers toretorden I am looking into that, my temporary solution has been to simply empty the library on the iTunes screen, click and drag the harddrive folder onto it. That's pretty much recovered most of the music as I left it I think... apart from the playlists ofcourse. We'll see if things are the same next time I startup the computer, it's like my iTunes just suddenly lost it's memory, maybe I shouldn't have skipped all those disk checks...

I was thinking about bulk-buying CD-R's online in those (you can get like 100+ for twenty quid) and just burning my favourite albums onto them, I find hard copies very comforting... The DVD-R secondary backup is a good idea jackhammer, according to my iTunes I have 81.3 GB so that should be do-able? At least CD's and DVD's can be put in a shoebox and not infected with spyware and whatnot...

[Guybrush]

Ugh, iPrunes doesn't save playlists simply as files to store on your harddrive? Damn, what a sucky program.

[jackhammer]

You would need about 20 discs to back up then Molecules. Even 3 or 4 a day and you are done in less than a week. Plus if you have a dvd player with mp3 capability (most do), you can listen to your music on different players etc. They make great presents for people too!