Adventures In iTunes...

This post is a bit off-topic. Recently, I decided to gather up all of the CDs in my collection and get them organized into a library. I used to use WinAmp -- it was lightweight and had some nice features like skins and visualizations. But, technology had marched on and it was time to try something new. My first choice was iTunes -- it is easy to use and has a very useful service for finding the song names and in some cases even the album cover art.

But, I'm getting a little ahead of myself. The first step was installing the software. iTunes was relatively painless to install, but, using the online registration tool on the Apple web site to secure an Apple ID, proved to be surprisingly difficult. The web interface requires that I verify my email address. I tried at least five times to complete the email verification, but, on each occasion, the email verification failed. Fortunately, instead of using the web interface, the iTunes software has an integrated process for securing an Apple ID. By the way, the only reason you might need an Apple ID, aside from making a purchase in the Apple store, is to use the album cover art search, which happens to be integrated into the Apple store.

My collection of CDs ranges from a handful of 70's and 80's classics to a few more recent items. A significant number of items in between these two extremes are imported anime-themed CDs. So, I really gave the iTunes software a workout trying to find song names, but, in all, but, one instance, iTunes came though with flying colors -- the one instance iTunes couldn't identify was one obscure domestic release. With so many imported anime-themed CDs, the only major difficulty was translating the song names from Japanese into English. For that, I found a nice online resource -- VGMdb -- the music of visual arts and games. And, for the rare occasions where VGMdb failed me, Google translate came to the rescue -- it wasn't pretty, but, it was good enough for my humble purposes.

Here's an important tip regarding song names: You can change a song name after you've imported a CD, but, it's much easier to make sure the song names are the way you want them to be, before you start the CD import process.

The album cover search proved to be less than impressive with regard to almost everything in my collection. Out of 170 CDs, iTunes manged to find 25 album covers, which works out to about 14.7%. So, I actually had to scan most of my own CD covers. After a bit of poking around in the iTunes directory, I found that the album covers are essentially JPG format images sized at about 600x600. So, when I scanned the CD covers I resized the scans to 600x600 and saved them as JPG. I could also have run an image search online for appropriate CD covers, but, after trawling the depths of the web for a while, I decided to just scan my own CD covers.

Here's an important tip regarding album covers: If you have multi-CD sets and you want the album covers to take effect for all of the disks in the set, then you'll need to highlight the songs in the disks and either copy the album cover from the first disk or upload the album cover from your local storage. This also applies if you want different album covers for each disk in a set.

After a couple of days, I managed to add about 170 CDs to iTunes. Everything was working well until I decided to turn off the Wi-fi and work offline. Apparently, iTunes needs to connect with the Apple store at least once when the application is first launched. If iTunes cannot connect, every time I play a track from any uploaded CD, I get an error message stating that iTunes cannot connect to the store. That became annoying very quickly. And if you ignore the error messages, they just stack up, one over the other, waiting to be dismissed.

Another pesky problem with the iTunes application is that when I close the application and attempt to reopen the application, iTunes does not respond. Apparently, there are some helper apps that do not close when iTunes closes and these apps prevent iTunes from reopening properly. I acquired a nifty little piece of code that can be run in a batch file to clean up after iTunes and allow the application to be reopened:

@echo off
taskkill /im AppleMobileDeviceHelper.exe /f
taskkill /im APSDaemon.exe /f
taskkill /im distnoted.exe /f

With iTunes now on my s**t list, I decided to try Groove Music. Amazingly, Groove immediately recognized my iTunes library and immediately picked up all of the data and even the album covers. I was a very happy camper. So, now, I make changes and additions in iTunes and Groove automatically detects the changes and reorganizes the data accordingly. Groove isn't as flashy as iTunes and I wouldn't dare trust it with anything important, but, as a simple player that can consume an iTunes library, it works beautifully. That being said, I would have been even more impressed with Groove, if it came with skins and visualizations. But, at least it doesn't complain when I go offline.

A few notes on integrating Groove with iTunes libraries: First, when making changes to iTunes, Groove needs to be closed or it might pick up changes in progress and create duplicate ghost entries. Second, iTunes allows the album artist field to be blank and will automatically display "Various Artists" as needed. Groove needs to have the album artist field filled in, or it will display "Unknown Artist". So, fill in the album artist field in iTunes and where needed, explicitly specify "Various Artists" in iTunes.

Another thing that I found useful was to open Windows Explorer and search the iTunes library for music files. When the search results are displayed, select "save search" from the "search tools" menu and place the search link where it can be easily found. The search link will display a list of all of the music files stored locally in iTunes. iTunes will do the same thing, but, I can play an individual song from the list using Media Player without using iTunes.

January 17, 2017

Update

After working with iTunes and Groove for a while, I've found that if an album cover is changed in iTunes, that change might not be reflected in Groove. Possible workarounds involve either removing the offending album from both Groove and iTunes and re-adding the album to iTunes and allowing the automatic process in Groove to pick up the album again or deleting the entire Groove database and allow Groove to rebuild itself from the revised iTunes database.

Also, while working with a handful of collected MP3 files, I've found it convenient to assemble the MP3 files into virtual CDs and use iTunes' import process to assemble the virtual CDs into albums. In most cases where I've used virtual CDs, I usually have to provide the song names and album cover art, but, once they are imported, it is easier to work with imported songs as a group.

It took a while to get all of the CDs in my archive imported into iTunes. Again, I ended up scanning most of the album cover art as the album cover art search failed to find most of the album cover art represented in my CD collection. The final count was 290 albums and over 4900 songs, The actual CD count is slightly higher as there were a handful of multi-disc sets in my collection. So far, there have been no major issues using Groove Music in combination with iTunes.

February 6, 2017

Update

Recently, I updated iTunes to version 12.5.5.5 and my two major grievances appear to have been resolved with the latest update. Of course, the new update is not all sweetness and light. Apparently, the new update introduced a bug which allows users (like me) who are not using the iCloud service to delete items from the library when removing items from a playlist. But, aside from that issue, I can now open, close and reopen iTunes and I can use iTunes offline. Yay!

By the way, the secret image for this post is based on an original artwork by Reef1600 at Deviant Art.