Organization Problem in iTunes

[Mondt]

inb4changemediaplayer

I use itunes because... i dont feel like moving all my media. And the ipod support. I generally don't have problems with itunes; organization is usually not a problem because if the id3's are fucked I use a separate program to edit them and name the files accordingly.

Recently, however, my iTunes has been doing something strange. I have been finding a lot that the last song on albums decide to make their own album with the same name and same apparent id3 information. Huh. Weird.

So anyway, I listen to albums linearly usually so I click the first to start the album. It does it. Then it moves to the second song. Suddenly, the second song is on the other album. As I select the rest of the songs, they all move to the other album. All except the first.

This poses an organizational problem when putting music onto my ipod and honestly I have no idea what could possibly be happening. Any ideas?

[synkr0nized]

Something in your ID3 tags is different.

[Mondt]

I can't find anything that is different! I have very limited experience with ID3 tag editing but I've been looking around and can't find anything! And it's very strange that they would just change except for the first song.

[synkr0nized]

Well, conduct an experiment. :D

Back up the songs or write down the what the correct ID3 information may be. Change it on all of them, or maybe on one or two. See if that puts them in their own album.


Also look to see if you have iTunes set to automatically correct/update ID3 information when it loads a song. I suppose that wouldn't explain why the first one didn't similarly get changed, though.

[Mondt]

Anything I can find seems to be the same (http://imgur.com/OwUY5.png) except Title and Track number, which is a given.

Wargh!

[synkr0nized]

Change it on all of them, or maybe on one or two. See if that puts them in their own album.


Ultimately you probably can just overwrite all of them with whatever tag info you want and get it to chill out and organize the way you want, but that might not reveal what was different / why iTunes decided to group them differently.


Also, for added potential information to identify where the problem is, load the album/songs into a different media program, if you have one installed, and see if they still show as being in separate albums.

[Mondt]

Windows Media Player is still cool with them. <.< I don't think VLC will auto-organize things so I dunno. I'll try just changing bullshit to whatever. I really don't care that much why it's happening as long as I know how to make it not happen.

Edit: Removing all the id3 info in itunes and then putting back exactly the same fixes it.

God I hate itunes.

Anyone know something better with ipod support?

[synkr0nized]

A lot of the "bigger names" can swing it. On Windows, Winamp [my preferred audio player], WMP, and probably Foobar can. Well, here's a small overview (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iPod_managers).


As to it fixing in iTunes, I'm aware that you've checked and it seemed all the same but there had to have been something different in that one tag or something, even if it was just an extra space. I have yet to encounter that in iTunes [used on my Mac laptop and in Windows when helping my mom organize her iPod] without a tag being slightly different or wholly unique from its brethren.

[Mondt]

You know, this is kind of unrelated, but I have always always always hated WMP.

For reasons I just can't explain.

[Meister]

I don't know one program that does tag editing and iPod support, but I do know one that lets you edit MP3 tags in bulk. Maybe that would help a little?

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

You can always try Tune-up Media, I hear that's pretty good, though you have to pay for it. It basically takes all of your songs, organises them, adds any missing info like the songs complete lyrics and album covers, then groups them all into the right place and in the right order.


I've had this same thing a couple of times with different bands on my iPod, with maybe 1 or 2 songs getting listed in a completely seperate file to all the others, but I've learn to live with it because it's too much hassle trying to fix it.