when i try to select one or two albums, it only lets me select one folder.
how do I get it to do a smaller batch, like everything beginning with the letter r"A"?
You should focus on fixing your iTunes library first. Once that is repaired, you can drag any selection of songs from iTunes into Picard.
Not wanting to single you out - It is probably a failure more about how Picard is advertised/perceived then anything else (you were not to know any better) but that screenshot shows probably most of the problems people have using Picard.
Loading too many tracks. Picard will likely crash.
If it doesn;t you will have to move thousands of tracks around by hand and in a list of tens of thousands of albums it will be a nightmare.
Your tracks seem to be in dozens of different albums. ARe these correct? You have 1 or 2 tracks per albums shown?
Likely not.
Best practice.
If you have reasonable tags
Get a smaller selection of files (like you say maybe the Aās or 1 artist of something)
Hit CLuster
This will attempt to but the selected files into logical releases based on your existing tags.
Then highlighting the clusters folder hit
Lookup.
This will match based on the cluster and tags.
Have a look what happen on the right side.
Drag and files from one release to another (or from the left side) to get the correct matches.
For the remaining unmatched files try hitting āScanā that will try and look at the āaudio fingerprintā and match it to the database.
Not always perfect (as it is too easy for people to submit audio fingerprints that are wrong)
3 Likes
I got it fixed. I had to rename my old save of the library to iTunes library.itd or something like that, reopened iTunes and everything was backā¦ but i assume that ALL the data / changed got reverted :?
As I donāt use iTunes I canāt say you exactly what to do, but updating the iTunes tags has proved especially difficult in the past. Essentially iTunes keeps a separate database of all info about your tracks, and it does not like it if the files are changed or moved. It wonāt use changed tags from the files automatically, but there is some way to let iTunes resync with the files I suppose.
Your music files are unaffected by the contents of the database. The databaseās job is to index your music, copying the metadata in for quicker access. Now you can use Picard to update the tags on the files. Just get info or play the music for iTunes to update the database.
If any music is missing (added after the database was backed up), just drag it into the Add to iTunes folder to re-insert it into the database.
iTunes re-indexes files when accessed. Just play the music or get info to update them.
This post made me think of this:
https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-music-no-seriously/
6 Likes
okay, right now i got ALL my songs back by fixing that iTunes library.itb file.
What do i do next time to prevent this form happening?
right now i am just waiting for iTunes to upload around 11,000 songs to the iCloud. This is because when I originally got the 40,000 songs from my DJ friend, apple had a 25,000 song itunes match limit. This limit was increased to 100,000 sometime in the past six months.
From the other thread:
See Fresoās post above as well.
Since you just got a whole new dump of music, this is a good time to step out of your comfort zone and try some different applications. You can always swap back to iTunes if you donāt find anything good!
iTunes is the only program that semi-regularly promps threads like this oneā¦
Another good option would be to take the first piece of advice you were given, and work on a copy of your music, so that you donāt have to worry about this at all while youāre editing things.
3 Likes