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Topic: itunes tag madness when re-importing (Read 2995 times) previous topic - next topic
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itunes tag madness when re-importing

casual browsing and searching through the archives did not offer any new insights, so here's my first post.

the back story:
i lost the ntfs volume that contained my itunes library (and i didn't have a full backup -- long story).  i'm currently re-ripping, using itunes.

things to note:
. original files were all mp3's ripped with itunes
. i did have a backup of the library database (xml) file

when i re-rip a cd, provided it has the same title, artist, and track names as it had before, it will nicely prompt me whether i want to "replace" the old (missing) tracks, and upon confirmation add the new tracks to the library but keep play count, last played, rating, etc.  good show!

the craziness:
. if i re-rip to mp3's, all is fine -- all fields are preserved
. if i re-rip to alac, then rating, play count, last played gets saved, but BPM does not!

since i dj for dances and most of my music has bpm ratings (acquired by hand, because automatic bpm calculators tend to choke on swing music) this is a fairly big deal to me.  i don't want to enter them all by hand again...so...given that i want to switch to alac, any advice?  i mean, anything except "that's a bug in itunes" or "stick to mp3's, no one will be able to hear the difference if you go 320 vbr".

is there a tool to import tags from an itunes db file and apply them to another library?  that'd be perfect -- i'd just let it nuke all my bpm ratings and then re-import them from the old library db.

cheers,

  alex.

itunes tag madness when re-importing

Reply #1 –
There's no tool specifically for this, but it'd be possible to create one. A bit of javascript hacking would do it. I'd point you to a similar javascript, except that my webserver is down for the forseeable future.

I'll try to fire that machine up tonight and see if I can get that stuff transferred over so I can at least give you a starting point, if not actual code to do it.

itunes tag madness when re-importing

Reply #2 –
Quote
I'll try to fire that machine up tonight and see if I can get that stuff transferred over so I can at least give you a starting point, if not actual code to do it. :)
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a starting point would be peachy keen, thanks!

itunes tag madness when re-importing

Reply #3 –
Okay, here's an example script that you can use as a starting point. I've attached it to this thread in the uploads area: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=36826

It actually is designed to let you save the ratings, playcount, and last played time from one copy of iTunes, and restore them onto a different machine.

It's in the form of an HTA file (HTML Application), but it's just text, so open it in any text editor to see how it works. It doesn't do BPM, as such, but adding that would not be all that difficult.