iTunes help

S

Sharon Bowman

Sharon Bowman
This will not involve wine.

I desperately need help with iTunes. I have a bunch of songs by The Strokes in my iTunes library. Yesterday, though, I added some more, and suddenly saw a horrible thing had happened: those I had before are classified under "T" (just after The Smiths and The Specials), and those I just added have been classified under "S" (just after Stevie Wonder) despite bearing the name "The Strokes" and not just "Strokes."

How did this happen? How can I reconcile the two blocs of Strokes songs? It makes no sense and is dividing not only albums but my sanity.

Thank you.
 
Follow these simple steps:

1. Highlight the songs that have the "wrong" artist name.
2. Type Command+i (on a Mac this is the Apple/Clover key)
3. An info box will appear
4. Check the artist box
5. Type the name of the artist as you want it to appear
6. Click OK

This should do it. If not, use Command+i to find out how the other songs are listing the artist. Copy it. Then go through these steps again and instead of typing the name, paste it.
 
I have had similar problems -- if you can get into the "get info" mode, just keep changing the names of things until you notice the albums unifying. My worst case scenario -- OK, in the last episode of The Sopranos they played the same opera aria that they had played in the first episode (when Tony fainted as the ducks flew away from his swimming pool). It was sung by Monserrat Caballe (il bel sogno...). SO I bought a compilation of arias by Caballe, and the 10 songs showed up in iTunes as 10 different albums. It turned out that sometimes the artist was "Monserrat Caballe with the London Symphony Orchestra" or "The Berlin Philharmonic" etc. I fixed that and it didn't make the problem entirely go away so I had to look more, and found that sometimes her name had an accent acute and sometimes not.

If it LOOKS like you have the same artist maybe there is an extra space in the name or something that is more obvious to a computer than it is to you. Keep tinkering and eventually it will merge.

BTW that is a great aria, and David Chase is quite a romantic despite all the blood and gore in The Sopranos.

Frank
 
Frank, unfortunately, the name of the artist is exactly the same. I can cut and paste the artist's name between one song classified as "S" and another classified as "T" and nothing changes.

Unrelatedly, "Chi il bel sogno di doretta" is also in the glorious 1986 Merchant-Ivory film "A Room With a View" (though sung by Kiri Te Kanawa). I urge one and all to view or review that movie; complete loveliness.
 
Is the one being sorted as "Strokes, The" and the other as "The Strokes"? If so, do the same routine with the info screen but go to the sort tab and make those both the version you want.
 
There was something else that also helped besides the artist name. You have to move forward in a spirit of scientific experimentation. I wish I could remember what works.

My DEBUGGING idea -- completely rewrite the description so it EXACTLY matches your previous album IN EVERY DETAIL and see if you can make it merge that way. Of course most of the information will now be wrong. But you can then change things back to correct that. See what I mean? If I remember correctly there was SOMETHING other than the "ARTIST" field that was getting in the way but I just can't remember what it was.

I love Kiri te Kanawa but Caball has breath control that is astonishing and that has a surprisingly strong effect on the way the piece sounds...

F
 
Yes! Thank you, Scott!

I clicked on "Tri" (my iTunes is in French; "tri" means "sort") for the Strokes songs that were under "S" and saw that "artiste pour le tri" was Strokes. I clicked the tab and added "The" and they all went back with the others!

Triumph.

Frank, agree about the cantatrices, but am particularly enamored of "Room With a View" (also has KTK singing "O mio babbino caro").
 
In tomorrow's New York Times, (which arrives a day early here in NJ) they suggest that the best way to approach a visit to Florence would be to read Forster's novel (or, obviously, watch the Merchant Ivory version).

Florence article

I've loved the movie for a long time. And of course the town and the region.

To take a 90 degree turn -- my neighbors are finishing up a couple of weeks in Kerala. Fortunately their trip did not involve getting within a few hundred miles of Mumbai. But if anyone were interested I would post some of the details of where they stayed. Down in Kerala, people of rather ordinary means can live in palatial settings that are strongly reminiscent of the background to a Merchant Ivory film about 19th century maharajahs. And everyone is very kind, and the air smells of cardamom and other spices and there are delicious fish just out of the fisherman's net.

Actually I'll post this whether anyone is interested or not:

The Chittoor Palace in Cochin

The Ambady Estate in Munnar

The Shalimar Spice Garden in Periyar

OG's Beach Bungalow in Mararikulam

They say the whole trip has been astonishingly beautiful. Briliiant stars at night, parrots and monkeys chasing each other around, bliss.

Frank
 
My ITunes has been stuttering on playback since I upgraded to version 8. I've increased the streaming buffer size as high as it would go, that didn't help. Very annoying.
 
You never know. Sounds like you may need some basic cleaning.

Run the disk utility to repair permissions and erase free space.

How much free disk space do you have?
 
The updates are what got me in trouble in the first place.

No, I was hoping to avoid having to do the whole reinstall thing. Frankly, I'm not sure it'll even help. Are older versions still available for download?

The issue seems to be getting some play on Apple's user forums, maybe they'll come out with a patch soon.
 
Looks like there is some talk.

Wonder how they could screw something like this up.

(If you haven't turned Genius on, don't. If you have it on, turn it off.)
 
I haven't turned it on. It's the kind of feature I happily ignore. I get creeped out by my computer spying on me and reporting back to the mothership, even "anonymously."
 
I basically hate Version 8.

Do yr downloads "stutter"?

If you load songs from CD whatever goes wrong with reading the CD will show up in the playback.

But what does this have to do with Kerala?!?

Frank
 
Download speed seems unaffected, if that's what you mean. Or do you mean is the stuff I bought from the ITunes store affected by the glitch? If so, yes, it seems fairly universal. I don't really load stuff from CDs, or haven't in a few years, anyway.

As to Kerala, my understanding is that the subcontinental version of ITunes is mercifully free of this bug.
 
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