Back Your Sh#& Up!

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So I've spent weeks now working on my iTunes database, and I've added 27 GB of music files. Coworker S. has asked me at least once a week if I've done a backup of all my changes. And, at least once a week, I look down at my feet and reply, "No, and I really need to, I know." I'm the first person to ask others if they've done a backup recently, and I have absolutely no sympathy for those who don't.

I'd be really pissed if I lost all those changes. Like sit and a corner and cry kind of pissed. However, I still hadn't done one yet. Duh!


Well today he asked me, again, and I had the same bad answer. He replied, "You know, it's like one of your users typing a 20 page document, never once saving it, and the computer crashes. " Ok. That put it into perspective. Just to be sure I got the point, he sent me an email, with a blank body, but a subject line that read: "BACK YOUR SH#& UP".

Alright already! I am, as we speak, backing the sh#& up.

FixTunes

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.