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

[evernanon.livejournal.com]

The "Current Music: Track 04" gave me a chuckle.

That's a toughie. I was going to say, how could you not know all the music in your library, but then I realized that I have songs on mp3 CDs in my car that I don't know because Doug burned them for me and put stuff on there that he thought I'd like. But maybe it's odd that the orphaned songs happened to be ones you don't know. Are they all by the same artist?

Unfortunately, I don't think software currently exists that recognizes individual songs by their waveforms; all the track info you can pull off the web looks at the data of an entire album and matches up songs based on that context (the totality of track lengths etc.)... so my suggestion would be to play the songs for everyone you know and someone is bound to know what they are.

[evernanon.livejournal.com]

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.

In librarian-speak, there's no name authority control. All of the tracks in which the artist is entered exactly the same way are "collocated" together and I'm guessing that probably albums are identified by [more librarian-speak] name-title added entry: the combination of artist + album name (as long as they are exactly the same). So if the artist on a track is even slightly different -- say, if there's a "and guest artist" tacked onto the end -- that'll make it appear to be a completely different artist to the dumb computer... and by extension, the difference will make that into a different name-title entry and thus a different "album."

[glaucon.livejournal.com]

can you quote a line or two from them? your friendslist could probably identify them all.