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I don't grok iTunes yet. I used to use a music program that came with my music player, which is not an iPod. But, this program is a bit flakey and tends to decide that it can't find albums that I know it should be able to find online. So, I decided to try iTunes, since my primary music player is actually my laptop these days.
It's copying stuff just fine, but I can't figure out how to tell it, "Okay, show me the albums you have. No, not the individual songs, just the names of the album." And I don't yet know how to tell it, "Show me just the songs from one album, listing them in the order in which they appear on the album." I have only been using iTunes for a few hours, mostly watching it set itself up, so this may be a matter of a couple of minutes of experimentation, but it is not immediately obvious how to do these things.
It's copying stuff just fine, but I can't figure out how to tell it, "Okay, show me the albums you have. No, not the individual songs, just the names of the album." And I don't yet know how to tell it, "Show me just the songs from one album, listing them in the order in which they appear on the album." I have only been using iTunes for a few hours, mostly watching it set itself up, so this may be a matter of a couple of minutes of experimentation, but it is not immediately obvious how to do these things.
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Also, the Search box in the upper right is a quick way to narrow down to just one album (or at least, one album plus whatever other random stuff matches your search string). Clicking on the column headers will let you change the sort behavior; "by artist", "by album", and "album by artist" will all list the tracks in the album order as long as the track number tags are set correctly.
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From there, you can probably figure out the other question.
(To change sort order, click on the column headings to say "sort by this column".)
Odds are all settings are in the View menu or the Preferences dialog.
To make sure you rip into mp3, you want the "Import Settings" button in the General preferences.
(Note: I am looking at the Mac version for this. Things may be a bit different in Windows.)
The online help might not suck.
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Um, I think I ripped everything to mp3, but I'll check. There are some oddities.
First, I have about 9 - 10 gb worth of music, but iTunes only has 4 - 5 gb. I need to figure out if this is because mp3s are smaller than wmas, or if there's stuff it didn't copy over.
Second, I have duplicates. This is because I have duplicates due to careless copying or confusion from when I used the old software, entered in an album by hand, and then re-entered it when the software could actually find the album. I'm not sure how to figure out which version of a duplicate is best to kill, but I really don't need multiple copies of everything taking up laptop hard drive space.
Third, I have some weird cases where I get something with one or with fairly few songs. In the case of fairly few songs, I think this is because it was copying what I had when I copied a somewhat damaged CD, and thus only could copy a few of the songs. And, there are some CDs that only have 4 or 5 songs on them.
But, then there are some entries where it's a single song that is clearly from a CD where I have all the other songs, and I don't know what's up with that.
I currently have a bunch of podcasts as if they were music, because they were all in the music folder, but I might want to tell iTunes that they're actually podcasts.
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Either way, I'll need to compare everything, yes.
What I want to be able to do, if it's possible, is if I've got two versions of mp3 files -- one converted from wmas and one mp3s from the beginning -- being able to figure out which is which, and killing the mp3s that were converted from wmas, as they're likely to be of lower quality.
The way this situation would have come about is my copying all of
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There are two settings in the Advanced Preferences I leave checked:
1. Keep iTunes Music folder organized
2. Copy Files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library
The first enforces a folder naming scheme Artist\Album\Track Number & Name as sub-folders of the Music folder in the iTunes directory, the second means that it copies the file to iTunes Music folder and you can archive or delete the original file from wherever it was on the hard disk originally. This means everything that shows up in iTunes is actually in the iTunes\Music folder and not scattered about the hard disk. I just find that easier to track.
There's a Show Duplicates option under the File menu too that shows all the files with duplicate track names. It's not perfect (you can have multiple tracks with the same name, particularly 'Track 01' of 'Unknown Album') but you usually look at the album and artist name, file size, bit rate etc. to figure out what files are actually duplicates and which are not.
The only use I have for genres is to separate podcasts and spoken word from the music. I use 'Speech' or 'Podcast' for most of the spoken stuff, and 'Audiobook' for the actual books and use smart lists to track what belongs where.
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I'm torn about how I want to handle podcasts. At the moment, I have music, podcasts, some audiobooks I've yet to copy, and one video/audio item -- Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book tour. Still need to find time to hear and watch the last four parts of that.
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(Looks like the Windows version needs you to do this.)
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(I killed the store links, too.)
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(AAC is a standard, and is reasonably well-supported these days, but not as widely as mp3. It is a better format from a technical perspective. (File size and sound quality.))
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