i-tunes Q

[arguchik]

so i had to re-load everything onto my new computer today. on saturday when i used the migration assistant to transfer files from my old laptop, it screwed a few things up, and after consulting with a geek guru, i decided a clean re-install of everything was a necessary step. i figured out a better way to transfer my files over, and it's pretty much done now. however...i have 6 "orphan" songs that showed up at the bottom of my i-tunes library. they are called, simply, "Track 01," "Track 01," (yes there are two of those) "Track 02," "Track 03," "Track 04," and "Track 05." Their lengths are 1:57, 3:53, 4:45, 6:17, 1:10, and 3:36, respectively. i have played them and i don't recognize the artists.

any suggestions for how to reunite these orphans with their mother albums?

added later: a second question: what to do about the sad blank space where there was no album artwork available? can i get that album artwork elsewhere? (e.g. no artwork was available for any of my beatles albums; and beck's "one foot in the grave" also remains artless. among others...)

oh, and a third question: why does i-tunes break up some albums, rather than keeping the songs together? this happened particularly with speakerboxx (several of the songs have guest artists, and when i click the "album view" option in i-tunes, it shows each song with a guest artist as its own separate album.

Comments

[arguchik.livejournal.com]

i think one of the track 01's, and the track 02-05 are all the same artist; the other track 01 is different. i have gotten a bunch of music from other people, a lot of it stuff that i'm not familiar with and haven't listened to yet. what's weird to me is that my old i-tunes library doesn't have these orphan songs, but when i imported that library into the i-tunes on my new computer, they appeared.

[evernanon.livejournal.com]

Your new computer probably has an updated version of the i-tunes software that might file things differently. For instance, maybe the old version allows for a pre-coordination of files (think file structure on your computer: the files don't have to be related in any obvious way, like having data in common, but the fact that they're all in the same folder gives them their relationship -- like a physical proximity) but maybe the new version only does post-coordination (as in, everything exists independently and the files have to have some kind of data which shows their relationship: same artist, same album title, etc.). If it needs data for post-coordination, and that data is not there, then the computer won't find/recognize the relationship that appeared to previously exist.

Question: was the Speakerboxx guest artist stuff recognized as being on the Speakerboxx album on your old system and those tracks are just being treated as their own "album" on the new, or has that always been the case?

[arguchik.livejournal.com]

actually, both of my computers are running the most up to date version of i-tunes--i always keep up with the updates (my OS-X updater is set to automatically check for updates every day, on both computers).

see my comment to glaucon for what the new i-tunes library did with the first song from reginal spektor's album, as an example of why this is weird.

i think the speakerboxx guest artist songs were separated in my old i-tunes library too; it just looks more pronounced in this i-tunes library because i'm using the album view rather than the basic song-list view. (if you have i-tunes, i'm using the middle option on the view menu, which puts the album artwork to the left of the song list for that album.)