Hmm, thanks, I"ll look into the WMP thing in case. Tagging I alwaysk do initially outside iTunes - I use MP3tag. I use iTunes to add a couple more obscure tags. I should check what version it defaults to. Had another instance a couple of weeks ago where sync failed and it was solved by removing and readding with fresh artwork the last two albums I had added to iTunes.
kargatron - ..unless you are cherrypicking for your dumb playlist?
That's exactly it. I'm cherrypicking CDs I ripped years ago that haven't made it to the "smart" rotation playlist. Some of them are really good and I'm tired of dorking with the smart playlist to get them on the ipod. Or, I've just gotten the new Beck or Rodrigo y Gabriela and want to listen to it straight through.
Germanprof - ...the only way I can get the library to get it through its thick head what I feel like listening to this week :-).
That's the thing about "smart" playlists. They can't read our minds. winky
Using a subset of the main "all unplayed" smart playlist, I can only decide I'm going to listen to that playlist limited by x amount of items/minutes/MB added least/most recently, or by genre/ramdomly.
Back to kargatron the UI becomes unresponsive for 10-11 seconds, and indeed, it's plausible it's doing lots of smart playlist updating then. I'll investigate if cleaning up improves that over time.
You probably already know this, but if you're hesitant to fiddle with your existing library, you can make a test library.
If you're handy with the multiple libraries concept and know how to make SURE to keep them separate & not jack up your hard drive with multiples of tracks, make a brand new library. Add all your music after making sure itunes settings are set to keep the music in its place where it is now. Try just one or two playlists and I bet you'll see how lots of playlists slows itunes and ipod down.
That's how I tested the theory about many playlists slowing itunes down years ago on the apple discussions boards. It made me a believer then. I'm not sure cleaning up an existing library will do exactly the same thing, but it should help.
It still pisses me off the ONE thing missing from rebuilding an itunes library fom an XML file is by Date Added. That's how I started arranging my library from the beginning of my itunes adventure. My library is existing from 2004, warts and all. I could get rid of a few hiccups (genre tags that are there but can't be deleted, for one - a bug from iTunes 6) if I could edit the XML file and reimport it.
Heh, Katrina, I suffered from that date-added issue the one time when I moved library locations and rebuilt from xml. At the time I had to switch all my date-added criteria to the roughly similar date-modified. That was in 2009, so I've reverted to date-added as time has moved on. My library dates from Nov 2003. It's entertaining to look at what tracks I haven't digitally listened to in over a decade.
My smart playlists have long been "good enough" - in portable situations, I'm perfectly fine doing relatively little on-demand listening, knowing I'll like the variety of music populated on my player. So I pretty much have no specific idea what's on it at any given sync - it's all "magic". My on-demand listening is mostly at home, or via rdio at work if desired.
On WMP privacy options tab, and again on the library tab, uncheck everything. There is an option on each tab to "Update music files by retrieving information from the internet" and it can get triggered when you browse to a webpage that has embedded WMP. All in the background - you'd have no idea WMP has been launched and is helpfully updating all your lovingly tagged tracks. It's diabolical that the same setting is on two different tabs, if you ask me.
The default WMP settings on older version always had those checked, and windows updates rechecked them. Last update I took it seemed to leave them alone, but I still check, out of habit. That damn setting caused me hours of work. It got rid of track numbers and put a lot of bullshit in the composer field. Thank god it didn't attack all my tracks, just a random subset.
I always try to get the artwork from iTunes (sometimes they are missing an album)
Then right-click copy the artwork image, remove downloaded artwork, and right-click paste the artwork so it gets written to each track's v2.3 tag.
Thanks, katrina - the library tab was clear but everything was checked in the privacy tab. All cleared now. We'll see if iTunes smiles more!
And thanks kargatron for the dumb-playlist-for-always-on suggestion. So simple, I should have seen it, but brilliant. Using a 5* rating to mean I always wanted it on the ipod touch was a decision made a few years ago and not questioned since (it perhaps made more sense that that point. It did have the merit that adding or removing things from that category was as easy as adding or deducting a star on any screen in itunes). But as the number of 5* albums crept up it was creating an increasingly large non-rotating core and decreasing the chances that other stuff would bubble up. It also inhibited me from rating some albums 5*. As you say, using it for rating only gives me more categories to rotate with.
It prompts me to reconsider 2* as well. I think I am going to retain 1*'s current function ("my goodness, delete this now, it's horrible!" applied while listening on the ipod touch and chased down later via playlist), but I have also been using 2* for a non-rating function. When I get a huge influx of new stuff, like 12 hour Bach Guild collections, and don't want it all to hit the ipod at once via my "never played" smart list, I use a 2* rating to exclude things from the smart playlist system. But it strikes me now that I could as easily use a key word in, say, the comment field to achieve that exclusion (slightly more work, but it's not a daily task), or maybe even better make a dumb playlist for things I want to exclude and exclude that list from all smart playlists - then I would just have to delete things from that list to include them. Then 2* could have a rating function (maybe something like "really not feeling like listening to this but give it another listen before deleting").
I've been doing something like this with stuff that gets accidentally deleted from itunes and needs to be re-added, or stuff ripped from CDs I've been listening to for years. Obviously when added to iTunes it gets a current date-added date, and that messes with my smart playlist for keeping track of stuff I just bought (date added = last month, plays = 0). So with those older things I put "nichtneu" (not new) in the comment field and create an exclusion based on that.
Anyway, thanks; you pinpointed a weakness in my strategy of using almost all smart lists and opened up some options.
Ugh. I made a dumb always-on playlist with about half my 5* stuff, changed the 5* list to rotate and exclude the dumb list, and now my iPod Touch is stuck in permanent "waiting for the changes to be applied". Tried rebooting PC and ipod, and resetting sync history.
I hate this wretched software.
ETA, finally got past the waiting, and now I have 9.5 GB of "Other" clogging up the Touch. This is new, and the increase is about proportional to the amount of music that should have been removed from the Touch. Off to research how to get rid of that.
Seems like a restore is the general recommendation. Don;t have time for that right now.
When I get a huge influx of new stuff, like 12 hour Bach Guild collections, and don't want it all to hit the ipod at once via my "never played" smart list, I use a 2* rating to exclude things from the smart playlist system.
No, don't do that - use the checkbox, it's tailor-made for this issue, because all smart playlists have the option of "include checked only". I use it all the time for feeding box sets over time into my playlists. Don't Leave Home Without It! And hey, it frees up another star!
Basically, using it that way, then just about all your smart playlists should use that option and be done with it. I have an "unchecked" playlist (which is a not-in-checked-playlist playlist) that I use to look at what's waiting in the wings to be checked and start appearing in my playlists. I routinely feed box set albums one by one into my listening spread over months this way.
I also uncheck tracks I dislike but want to keep in the library for reference purposes (they won't show up to be played afterwards), that may add some noise to the above, but not much.
the library tab was clear but everything was checked in the privacy tab. All cleared now.
Forgot to mention, it needs to be done for WMP in all user profiles on that PC. I have my own laptop that nobody else ever uses, and I forget to post that part.
I am positive this will stop your tracks mysteriously being edited on their own. Like I wrote in that old post from apple discussions, iTunes is too stupid to update tracks from the internet. That functionality was never built in...well, back in the day.
Now with iTunes Match I suppose I should investigate further...not sure what that would do to track tags. I think nothing, unless you later download the match version from iCloud.
Hmm, that's interesting too, and had also not occurred to me. Do you think this strategy ever ends up with tracks going AWOL because they lose their check mark? Looking at my library right now I see about 35 random tracks that are not checked, and I have no recollection of ever intentionally using the feature. Stray clicks? Still, like you say, keeping a reference playlist for periodic checking should ameliorate that. (I already do that for some other things. For instance I use a "FullAlbum" tag in the "Sort Show" field (for which I have no other use) to distinguish entire albums from ones where I only have one or a few tracks (most of my playlists are based on full albums only; there's a separate list to rotate the waifs and orphans. I think my biggest pet peeve with iTunes is the constant maintenance needed to keep it from syncing one or two tracks from an album - "Shuffle by Album" does not get it done. I hate browsing while out walking, deciding I fancy listening to an album, and finding I only have the first track. Hate it.).
I can see a major overhaul in the works. Am going to have to reset and restore the Touch first to get rid of all that Other junk though.
Hmm. Did a factory reset and restored from backup. An hour and a half later, the result:
The "Other" category has increased to 30.55GB. And 3000 tracks were copied over but the music app lists no content.
!@*!
Not sure what else to do now other than another factory restore and not use the backup, but set up everything from scratch.
:-(
ETA, that seems to have done the trick. Could have messed around with older backups at an hour plus per attempt, but decided maybe a spring clean was not all bad.
Yes, I would guess stray clicks on the checkmarks. It's easy to do - I should know ; )
Hold up on setting up everything from scratch - I recall hearing about that "Other" category thing.
Yes, I did read that. I even bought PhoneClean, recommended there. It didn't help. I read that and several other Apple threads and worked through all the solutions I found. In the end I went ahead with the start from scratch. Which seems to be working so far. I am not totally against a clean start every now and then.
Well everything seems to be syncing properly now, "Other" is back down to 0.6 GB, my dumb permanent rotation list is set up, checkmarks are in play...now I can spend weeks playing with album ratings to fine tune.
This discussion did lead me to check on unintended "strays" unchecked, and I found a large handful... My intended unchecked pile (all due to box sets) is ~200 long. E.g. that big Elvin Jones box, I still have three albums to "unleash" 11 months after purchase.
Apropos of little besides the subject of iTunes, one smart playlist of mine amuses me: "Not heard in >10 years". 60 tracks. Feels odd to have the capacity to measure that set so easily. Possible of course that I've heard some of them since on cd or elsewhere, but for most, it's quite plausible I haven't heard them in over a decade. Weird.
Doesn't at make you want to play (and thus destroy) the list?
I thought it was ironic when I started of hauling my playlists the other day and discovered that some of the titles on my 5* list (intended to mean: these are important albums that I really like and won't on my iPod at all times for whenever I feel like playing them) were also on my "not played in >3 years" list. Again some have been listened to on CD, but not all. Apparently there is music that I think of as favorite but don't actually listen to.
OK, here's my next iTunes question. How do I banish Al Kooper?
Having totally wiped my ipod touch, started afresh, and re-synced my playlists, with sync set to selected playlists, I am now finding that I have a bunch of tracks on the iPod touch that I did not put there. In fact, I just searched, and those tracks are not on any playlists. They are not in my iTunes library. In fact they do not exist on my Windows profile. But they do exist in my wife's profile and itunes library.
One theory I had: when restoring the ipod was there some weird option I missed that adds all tracks previously bought from iTunes? (I rarely buy music from iTunes, but it is theoretically possible that these are tracks I bought there for my wife). I have been searching the music tab for the device and iTunes preferences but don't see anything. "Purchased" is not checked in the playlists sync dialog. Am I missing something?
Or is there another explanation?
(I have a very vague memory of having something like this happen once before, but can't remember what the solution was).
There are days when iTunes feels more like a hobby than a music player.
Gp, are they iCloud tracks? On your touch, go to Settings -> Music and make sure you uncheck 'Show All Music'. Also, there's a iTunes setting under Prefs-Store for that, I think. Just guessing.
@kargatron, I did find that and unchecked it in my first session of puzzling over it this morning. Made no difference.
@Katrina, I have in the past very occasionally seen that message if my wife or daughter left the program open in their profile and switched user instead of logging out, but not generally and not recently.
ETA, hmm, I am not at home now and can't check, but is it possible that there are some tracks that iTunes made a M4a version of in the iTunes media folder (which I don't use, and I do not by default ask iTunes to make its own copies of things) that are not in my library but it somehow decided to sync anyway?
I guess I'll delete them manually on the Touch and see if they stay gone. But I am still puzzled as to how music that is not in my library or even profile can get synced to my Touch, especially when I have it set to only sync selected playlists.
Well, that's good you see that message now & then - it means they have separate ITL library database files and re-doing everything didn't combine them.
Hmm, getting music synced that isn't in your library just doesn't seem possible, unless it came from iCloud.
If you have a new Touch you can swipe & delete the tracks for now...but you want to know WHY. WHY. WHY!!!
When the Touch is plugged in, do you see anything differently as far as Al Kooper being in a playlist on the touch By clicking the triangle by the touch in the left sidebar?
The only other back door I can think of is that I do have my wife's music folder set to share so that I can do backups for everyone from my profile, so her music folders are visible from my profile. But that still does not explain why iTunes would have picked up tracks not referenced in the library or in any of the playlists synced.
I was wondering whether the iPod Touch got left connected to the computer while my wife switched to her profile - but surely she would have to have gone through a fairly deliberate set of steps to only sync a few selected albums from her library onto my device, and to do so without erasing anything else on my device...and she has no memory of interacting with my ipod. (Ha, I first wrote "has no memory of interacting with my Touch." That would be sad.)
And yes, I want to know WHY! (That's why I haven't deleted the songs yet - I don;t want to solve it before I understand it :-)).
iTunes should be programmed to explain itself!!! I want AI in my iTunes!!!!
This thread is making me bitter that Apple didn't just keep making bigger iPods. We should be up to, what, 2 or 3 TB by now, right? I had a friend recently scoff at me for carrying an iPod as well as an iPhone. Why, she asked, wouldn't I just put music on my phone? What use could I possibly have for more than 1 or 2 gigs for music? Ah well.
I will add that I have various and sundry goofy things happen to my library that seem to have to do with iTunes Match and/or iCloud. For example, it will revert to the original album name on box sets (from the iTunes store) that I have broken into individual albums. Perhaps relevant to Prof's problem, I've had an issue with multiple copies of an album that I manually added to my phone. Tried to delete and start over, and the album showed up again. I am guessing that copies are being restored from an iCloud backup; haven't yet cared enough to investigate.
iTunes doesn't hate you. In fact, iTunes doesn't care if you live or die.
LOL, I would buy a 2 TB iPod! What fun!
I've stayed well away from iTunes match & the icloud stuff. Well, on my iPhone I let it back up photos & contacts to iCloud, but that's it.
GP, it has to be in your library/cloud to get on the device. iTunes can't pull a music file out of thin air.
Or, if you've set it to manually manage, it could be added that way and not be in the ITL library.
What's your setting on the touch for iCloud?
If you want to double-check it's not in your library file, you can open up the XML version in Wordpad and do a ctl-F to find "Kooper".
Comments
That's exactly it. I'm cherrypicking CDs I ripped years ago that haven't made it to the "smart" rotation playlist. Some of them are really good and I'm tired of dorking with the smart playlist to get them on the ipod. Or, I've just gotten the new Beck or Rodrigo y Gabriela and want to listen to it straight through.
Germanprof - ...the only way I can get the library to get it through its thick head what I feel like listening to this week :-).
That's the thing about "smart" playlists. They can't read our minds. winky
Using a subset of the main "all unplayed" smart playlist, I can only decide I'm going to listen to that playlist limited by x amount of items/minutes/MB added least/most recently, or by genre/ramdomly.
Back to kargatron the UI becomes unresponsive for 10-11 seconds, and indeed, it's plausible it's doing lots of smart playlist updating then. I'll investigate if cleaning up improves that over time.
You probably already know this, but if you're hesitant to fiddle with your existing library, you can make a test library.
If you're handy with the multiple libraries concept and know how to make SURE to keep them separate & not jack up your hard drive with multiples of tracks, make a brand new library. Add all your music after making sure itunes settings are set to keep the music in its place where it is now. Try just one or two playlists and I bet you'll see how lots of playlists slows itunes and ipod down.
That's how I tested the theory about many playlists slowing itunes down years ago on the apple discussions boards. It made me a believer then. I'm not sure cleaning up an existing library will do exactly the same thing, but it should help.
It still pisses me off the ONE thing missing from rebuilding an itunes library fom an XML file is by Date Added. That's how I started arranging my library from the beginning of my itunes adventure. My library is existing from 2004, warts and all. I could get rid of a few hiccups (genre tags that are there but can't be deleted, for one - a bug from iTunes 6) if I could edit the XML file and reimport it.
My smart playlists have long been "good enough" - in portable situations, I'm perfectly fine doing relatively little on-demand listening, knowing I'll like the variety of music populated on my player. So I pretty much have no specific idea what's on it at any given sync - it's all "magic". My on-demand listening is mostly at home, or via rdio at work if desired.
On WMP privacy options tab, and again on the library tab, uncheck everything. There is an option on each tab to "Update music files by retrieving information from the internet" and it can get triggered when you browse to a webpage that has embedded WMP. All in the background - you'd have no idea WMP has been launched and is helpfully updating all your lovingly tagged tracks. It's diabolical that the same setting is on two different tabs, if you ask me.
The default WMP settings on older version always had those checked, and windows updates rechecked them. Last update I took it seemed to leave them alone, but I still check, out of habit. That damn setting caused me hours of work. It got rid of track numbers and put a lot of bullshit in the composer field. Thank god it didn't attack all my tracks, just a random subset.
Some history on that
archived apple discussion
I always try to get the artwork from iTunes (sometimes they are missing an album)
Then right-click copy the artwork image, remove downloaded artwork, and right-click paste the artwork so it gets written to each track's v2.3 tag.
And thanks kargatron for the dumb-playlist-for-always-on suggestion. So simple, I should have seen it, but brilliant. Using a 5* rating to mean I always wanted it on the ipod touch was a decision made a few years ago and not questioned since (it perhaps made more sense that that point. It did have the merit that adding or removing things from that category was as easy as adding or deducting a star on any screen in itunes). But as the number of 5* albums crept up it was creating an increasingly large non-rotating core and decreasing the chances that other stuff would bubble up. It also inhibited me from rating some albums 5*. As you say, using it for rating only gives me more categories to rotate with.
It prompts me to reconsider 2* as well. I think I am going to retain 1*'s current function ("my goodness, delete this now, it's horrible!" applied while listening on the ipod touch and chased down later via playlist), but I have also been using 2* for a non-rating function. When I get a huge influx of new stuff, like 12 hour Bach Guild collections, and don't want it all to hit the ipod at once via my "never played" smart list, I use a 2* rating to exclude things from the smart playlist system. But it strikes me now that I could as easily use a key word in, say, the comment field to achieve that exclusion (slightly more work, but it's not a daily task), or maybe even better make a dumb playlist for things I want to exclude and exclude that list from all smart playlists - then I would just have to delete things from that list to include them. Then 2* could have a rating function (maybe something like "really not feeling like listening to this but give it another listen before deleting").
I've been doing something like this with stuff that gets accidentally deleted from itunes and needs to be re-added, or stuff ripped from CDs I've been listening to for years. Obviously when added to iTunes it gets a current date-added date, and that messes with my smart playlist for keeping track of stuff I just bought (date added = last month, plays = 0). So with those older things I put "nichtneu" (not new) in the comment field and create an exclusion based on that.
Anyway, thanks; you pinpointed a weakness in my strategy of using almost all smart lists and opened up some options.
I hate this wretched software.
ETA, finally got past the waiting, and now I have 9.5 GB of "Other" clogging up the Touch. This is new, and the increase is about proportional to the amount of music that should have been removed from the Touch. Off to research how to get rid of that.
Seems like a restore is the general recommendation. Don;t have time for that right now.
Basically, using it that way, then just about all your smart playlists should use that option and be done with it. I have an "unchecked" playlist (which is a not-in-checked-playlist playlist) that I use to look at what's waiting in the wings to be checked and start appearing in my playlists. I routinely feed box set albums one by one into my listening spread over months this way.
I also uncheck tracks I dislike but want to keep in the library for reference purposes (they won't show up to be played afterwards), that may add some noise to the above, but not much.
Forgot to mention, it needs to be done for WMP in all user profiles on that PC. I have my own laptop that nobody else ever uses, and I forget to post that part.
I am positive this will stop your tracks mysteriously being edited on their own. Like I wrote in that old post from apple discussions, iTunes is too stupid to update tracks from the internet. That functionality was never built in...well, back in the day.
Now with iTunes Match I suppose I should investigate further...not sure what that would do to track tags. I think nothing, unless you later download the match version from iCloud.
I can see a major overhaul in the works. Am going to have to reset and restore the Touch first to get rid of all that Other junk though.
Thanks for the tips.
The "Other" category has increased to 30.55GB. And 3000 tracks were copied over but the music app lists no content.
!@*!
Not sure what else to do now other than another factory restore and not use the backup, but set up everything from scratch.
:-(
ETA, that seems to have done the trick. Could have messed around with older backups at an hour plus per attempt, but decided maybe a spring clean was not all bad.
Hold up on setting up everything from scratch - I recall hearing about that "Other" category thing.
For me, it was frustrating finding what I had checked and unchecked but as you pointed out, you can do that with a playlist now.
I'm not sure the very early versions of iTunes had that as a choice. Wheeeee! Checked is false! About time!
What is "Other" and What Can I Do About It?
I thought it was ironic when I started of hauling my playlists the other day and discovered that some of the titles on my 5* list (intended to mean: these are important albums that I really like and won't on my iPod at all times for whenever I feel like playing them) were also on my "not played in >3 years" list. Again some have been listened to on CD, but not all. Apparently there is music that I think of as favorite but don't actually listen to.
Having totally wiped my ipod touch, started afresh, and re-synced my playlists, with sync set to selected playlists, I am now finding that I have a bunch of tracks on the iPod touch that I did not put there. In fact, I just searched, and those tracks are not on any playlists. They are not in my iTunes library. In fact they do not exist on my Windows profile. But they do exist in my wife's profile and itunes library.
One theory I had: when restoring the ipod was there some weird option I missed that adds all tracks previously bought from iTunes? (I rarely buy music from iTunes, but it is theoretically possible that these are tracks I bought there for my wife). I have been searching the music tab for the device and iTunes preferences but don't see anything. "Purchased" is not checked in the playlists sync dialog. Am I missing something?
Or is there another explanation?
(I have a very vague memory of having something like this happen once before, but can't remember what the solution was).
There are days when iTunes feels more like a hobby than a music player.
@Katrina, I have in the past very occasionally seen that message if my wife or daughter left the program open in their profile and switched user instead of logging out, but not generally and not recently.
ETA, hmm, I am not at home now and can't check, but is it possible that there are some tracks that iTunes made a M4a version of in the iTunes media folder (which I don't use, and I do not by default ask iTunes to make its own copies of things) that are not in my library but it somehow decided to sync anyway?
I guess I'll delete them manually on the Touch and see if they stay gone. But I am still puzzled as to how music that is not in my library or even profile can get synced to my Touch, especially when I have it set to only sync selected playlists.
Hmm, getting music synced that isn't in your library just doesn't seem possible, unless it came from iCloud.
If you have a new Touch you can swipe & delete the tracks for now...but you want to know WHY. WHY. WHY!!!
When the Touch is plugged in, do you see anything differently as far as Al Kooper being in a playlist on the touch By clicking the triangle by the touch in the left sidebar?
I was wondering whether the iPod Touch got left connected to the computer while my wife switched to her profile - but surely she would have to have gone through a fairly deliberate set of steps to only sync a few selected albums from her library onto my device, and to do so without erasing anything else on my device...and she has no memory of interacting with my ipod. (Ha, I first wrote "has no memory of interacting with my Touch." That would be sad.)
And yes, I want to know WHY! (That's why I haven't deleted the songs yet - I don;t want to solve it before I understand it :-)).
iTunes should be programmed to explain itself!!! I want AI in my iTunes!!!!
I will add that I have various and sundry goofy things happen to my library that seem to have to do with iTunes Match and/or iCloud. For example, it will revert to the original album name on box sets (from the iTunes store) that I have broken into individual albums. Perhaps relevant to Prof's problem, I've had an issue with multiple copies of an album that I manually added to my phone. Tried to delete and start over, and the album showed up again. I am guessing that copies are being restored from an iCloud backup; haven't yet cared enough to investigate.
iTunes doesn't hate you. In fact, iTunes doesn't care if you live or die.
I've stayed well away from iTunes match & the icloud stuff. Well, on my iPhone I let it back up photos & contacts to iCloud, but that's it.
GP, it has to be in your library/cloud to get on the device. iTunes can't pull a music file out of thin air.
Or, if you've set it to manually manage, it could be added that way and not be in the ITL library.
What's your setting on the touch for iCloud?
If you want to double-check it's not in your library file, you can open up the XML version in Wordpad and do a ctl-F to find "Kooper".