Driving song of the day: "Living Dead Girl" by Rob Zombie
Someone asked me about my results with FixTunes, a program I wrote about awhile back. To see my original post, click here. So I thought I'd give ya the scoop. The program definitely does exactly what it says it will - Fix the ID tags on your songs in ITunes. However I found some problems. First, if you are missing a LOT of information about the song, FixTunes may not find it. For example, I had some songs that had all the information in the file name, i.e. "AC-DC_You Shook Me All Night Long.mp3". No Album name, Year, etc. FixTunes skipped a lot of these, as it was trying to match artist name and couldn't. When you run this program, it WILL overwrite what you have as well. For example, some of the album art will change, because FixTunes finds its match and assumes your information is wrong. Genres will also be changed accordingly. So it's not a win-win situation. I'm happy because it really did save me a lot of time and work fixing all of those songs, even if it skipped quite a few. I'm not happy because I lost some of the album art to the CDs I really do have in my collection, and the genres weren't quite right sometimes.
After running FixTunes, I went back and fixed all the genres and any songs that were missing vital information for playlists. Databases are tricky things - and the lesson here is that relying on an automated database repair is not a perfect scenario. As the old saying goes... "Garbage in, garbage out." I'm afraid to run FixTunes again - I should play with it a little and see if you can control more about what it changes, but I'm afraid to. It took me 3 weeks to clean up everything to my liking. I should run a full backup of what I've got and just try it. If I do, I'll let ya know.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
FixTunes
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
RSS Feed (xml)
2 comments:
I remember when I finally converted a few of my rare song files over which had no ID tags. Ok, there were more than a few but these were all songs that were never released on CD so, I feel that it hurt no one. I also replace these songs if the CD with them on it gets released. Anyhow, took me forever to get done but left me with lots of genre issues. The Eagles are considered rock, country, classic rock and pop depending on the song. Is a pop song on an soundtrack in the soundtrack genre or pop genre. There are too many to use as examples... Heck, Madonna is in a new category every time she releases an album. I don't think I'd use FixTunes but I'm happy that you reviewed it to help those that may be considering it. B)
It sounds really cool but I have custom-named my own genres so I don't think I should mess with that, even though I do have some blanks I'd like to be filled in.
Post a Comment