problems with itunes / ipod

[aashbourne]

hey folk,

i was reading a thread on here, and there seem to be alot of people with ALOT of experience with itunes and ipods, i just got mine for xmas, because i could fill up 3 of my older mp3 players.

the problem i am having is when i sync my itunes to my ipod, some of the songs in the albums are out of order, and it really bothers me when i am trying to listen to a cd.

any help would be awesome

cheers,
alex

[Vince Kargatis]

Perhaps your id3 tags lack track number. That or you have shuffle toggled on. Either will produce that affect. Do they play in alphabetical order?

[Tom Storer]

When you look at the properties of the songs in iTunes, you'll see you can add the track number. If there are 10 tracks on an album, you can number them 1 out of 10, 2 out of 10, etc. That'll put them in the order you want, as long as you don't have "shuffle" on.

[Redington]

Are you automatically syncing the ipod, or manually adding songs. I've never used the auto-sync feature, so if that's what you're using, I can't help. If you're using manual, when viewing your ipod in iTunes, makes sure that you are sorting by album, artist, or track number and not by date added or some other tag, 'cause that can mess things up when going back to listen to the album on the ipod later. I don't know how this affects the auto-synced iPods.

[clinthopson]

The older versions of itunes drove me nuts but I've had good results with the current version.

All I ever do is move stuff from my cds to the ipod.

[aashbourne]

all i do is move stuff from cds to itunes also, and it only happens on like every 10th cd, they are not playing in alphabetical order, and they do hae track numbers, like i said, it only happens every so offten, but it is so annoying. they are in order when they go onto itues, but when i sync it (automatically sync) some go out of order.

cheers,
alex

[Borat Pri Hagafen]

When you view your itunes library, is 'track number' one of the categories you see? If not, go to 'view options' and select it. Click on 'track number' to sort them properly, and then click on 'album'. Your library should now be visible in order of album, and in the correct order of tracks, and anything you import from then on should be automatically imported that way.

It seems like even if you have the track numbers all in there, you need to do this to make sure they're ordered in that way.

[John L]

By coincidence, I just encountered the same problem for the first time, even though I have been using iTunes and iPods for several years.

Here's how it occured. I took several tracks from several different albums and made my own "album." I gave it my own title and put the tracks in order from 1 to 20 on iTunes. Everything looks fine on iTunes and plays fine on iTunes. But when I transferred it to my iPod, they were suddenly sorted and played in a different order. The ordering bunched together tracks from the original albums that they were taken from.

I haven't researched it yet, but I suspect the problem is that tracks from the same album have other common fields that the iPod is recognizing before it looks at the track numbers (A simple example is when you use the fields "disc 1 of 2" and "disc 2 of 2." In this case the iPod will look at disc number before track number and play all of disc 1 first.)

[Robert de St. Loup]

Use playlists. Make a playlist on iTunes and then transfer it to the iPod. The order should be maintained.

[aashbourne]

hey everyone,

i tryed to put on the track numbers on, but it still is out of order.

john, my situation is different from yours because i am importing straight off of the cd, i do not download music.

i am going to use the play list idea, i dont know why i didnt think of that... haha

well, thanks for the info.

cheers,
alex

[John L]

This is a strange question, but do any of you know how to contact the iTunes Store by email?

I try to make it a point not to shop at the iTunes store due to the copy protection and low bit rate. But I made an exception to get some Z.Z. Hill album tracks that I didn't have on my various discs. The MP3s came defective. The sound on many drops out completely halfway through the track. On others, the sound drops and and comes back repeatedly. I tried downloading one track twice just to confirm that the problem is with the iTunes Store itself.

Now I want to get in touch with them to ask for a refund. But there is no contact information at the iTunes Store. The e-mail receipt that I received is from Do_not_reply@Apple. Electronic mail is not accepted at that address. I tried writing Apple at their general customer service address, but received no response.

[Tom Storer]

I have no idea, but there must be online forums where iPod and iTunes users trade information and requests. You'll be more likely to find a contact solution in a dedicated forum like that one, which may even be monitored by Apple staff.

[Borat Pri Hagafen]

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/store/

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/store/download/

[John L]

Originally Posted by Borat Pri Hagafen

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/store/

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/store/download/

Thanks! Now why wasn't I able to find that?

[Hank Freid]

In my opinion To get albums to show up chronologically, make sure you have
the "Year" column showing (under view options), then you can select the artist under quick browse and click on the year column in your library to get the albums to line up in release order (as long as the tracks have the release year in the tag--some don't so you might have to add this information if you know it.)

Regards:
Hank Freid

__________________
marrakech hotel is owned by hank freid this hotel is situated in new york city

[Vince Kargatis]

On the off chance someone here has seen this problem, I'll ask:

My ipod nano 3g has recently (perhaps since iTunes 8.1.1) stopped updating metadata (playcount, last-played, etc) on sync. It does track this info - my smart playlists remain dynamic and correct on the ipod, but when syncing, all that info is lost in limbo. I've seen many references on the web (plenty in various apple forums) to this problem over the years, but with no obvious or consistent solution.

I've restored the ipod, and it did work once afterwards, but then acted buggy as above. This irks me to no end, as my smart playlists heavily depend on the metadata being lost. Anyone seen this recently, and resolved it?

[Pete C]

Originally Posted by John L

This is a strange question, but do any of you know how to contact the iTunes Store by email?

* * *

Now I want to get in touch with them to ask for a refund. But there is no contact information at the iTunes Store. The e-mail receipt that I received is from Do_not_reply@Apple. Electronic mail is not accepted at that address. I tried writing Apple at their general customer service address, but received no response.

Don't trust emails for customer service, talk to a person, and if you're frustrated by the difficulty of finding a number on a business's website, look no further:

http://www.contacthelp.com/

[Tom Storer]

I dock my iPod into a little thing with speakers to listen to it. There's a strange problem: the songs on albums and playlists are shuffled rather than playing in the order assigned via iTunes. I can't figure out why this is happening. Any ideas?

[Vince Kargatis]

This happens when Settings->Shuffle = "Off", Tom? If so, does the behavior change at all when you toggle through 'Songs' and 'Album' modes?

[John L]

Most likely, you have Settings > Shuffle = "on" No?

[Tom Storer]

Yes, I feel rather stupid. Shuffle was on. Since I never used shuffle mode, I had forgotten all about it. (Don't ask me how it got turned on, I don't know!)

[Pete C]

http://www.cultofmac.com/three-dog-n...ffle-rock/4564

[John L]

Originally Posted by Tom Storer

Yes, I feel rather stupid. Shuffle was on. Since I never used shuffle mode, I had forgotten all about it. (Don't ask me how it got turned on, I don't know!)

Don't feel stupid. With technology, it is most often those little simple things that give us the most headaches. But they are also the headaches that are easiest to relieve.

[steve(thelil)]

Originally Posted by John L

Don't feel stupid. With technology, it is most often those little simple things that give us the most headaches. But they are also the headaches that are easiest to relieve.

After the first few days that I had my iPhone, it stopped ringing out loud (the vibrator worked) I was totally convinced that the ringer didn't work. I tried every damned combination of possibly related settings on the settings app screen, every few days, for weeks, to no avail.

I finally brought it in to the Apple store. Turns out there is a tiny hardware button which does nothing other than turn the ringer on and off. I must have unknowingly switched it into the off position.

[LennyH]

I now have my first iPod. Have burned 185 CDs so far. Oy. The only hitch so far is that, for some reason, iTunes sometimes breaks CDs into separate chunks and you have to manually put them back together.

[Vince Kargatis]

Originally Posted by LennyH

I now have my first iPod. Have burned 185 CDs so far. Oy. The only hitch so far is that, for some reason, iTunes sometimes breaks CDs into separate chunks and you have to manually put them back together.

That sounds more like a drive problem than a software problem! ;]

But actually, I don't understand what you mean here. First, do you mean "burned" or "ripped"? An ipod wouldn't be relevant to the former. And if you're complaining about iTunes ripping behavior, what do you mean exactly? Any ripper generally just produces cd-track-to-file output. Or maybe this is just a joke I don't get.

[LennyH]

Ha ha. Vince, you are one literal sumbitch. I recognize this because I've been known to exhibit this behavior .

I did mean ripping. You haven't had the situation where you import a CD and iTunes breaks the album apart? The worst case I've seen so far broke 1 CD into like 6 or 7 groups of songs. I googled this problem and the fix is to check the "compilation" check box in the properties for each of the songs, then they all get grouped into one album again.

I created my first playlist for our xmas gathering today. I have over 7 hours of music on the list, which means that my drinking won't be interrupted by shuffling CDs around throughout the day.

[Pete C]

I only use iTunes on my desktop at work, and often when I import an album's worth of files it'll be broken into different conceptual albums by iTunes; thanks for the tip on how to keep them together.

Don't worry, Lenny, Vince always seems to have trouble understanding my explanations of technical particularities too.

One thing I can say for iTunes ripping--it's a hell of a lot faster than CDEX, which I use to rip CD to MP3--but it might be because I have CDEX set for high-quality encoding for VBR without on-the-fly ripping, so it probably does all sorts of analysis and buffering to temp files.

[John L]

The most important tip here is that you should always specify the correct data and organization before you rip. Otherwise, iTunes will take information from the CDB database, which is often problematic and full of errors, and will break up, organize, and classify your music and iTunes files in that way.

It is quite simple, actually. First, turn off the default iTunes setting for automatically ripping any CD that you insert. When you load your CD and see the infomation from CDB in your window, select "get information" and edit as necessary. In particular, make sure that the "artist," "album artist," and "album" are specified correctly for the entire album. Then check the "compliation" box. A "compilation" in iTunes should be a CD that has more than one artist (as opposed to a compilation of a single artist), and these folders are stored in a special "compilations" directory. Unfortunately, the CDB database seems to prescribe the "compilation" label quite randomly, which can potentially disorganize your iTunes files pretty badly, i.e. some albums of a single artist will be stored in the artist folder and others in the compilations folder, while compilations will be broken up into various artists folders.

One hitch: For some reason, there are cases where "get information" for the entire CD will not recognize your entered changes. In that case, select all the relevant tracks, right click, and select "get information."

You can correct errors after ripping as well, but that is generally more time consuming. As CDB seems to be the only game in town, there is no getting around manuel adjustments in any case.

[LennyH]

Thanks, John. Will give that a try. One thing that's surprisingly bad is the "genre" that comes from the database. A lot of my jazz albums come in as rock or classical.

You say that a ""compilation" in iTunes should be a CD that has more than one artist". Is there another way to put an album back together if iTunes splits it apart? It seems that the artist might be the key to this, as you seem to be suggesting. For example, one of the Albums that turned out to be a big mess upon import was Paul Desmond - Easy Living. The artist was listed as "various" rather than Paul Desmond and there were several combinations of the musicians listed as artist depending on the song. I assume now that the CD was originally broken up along these lines. I just went through and changed the artist to Paul Desmond on all the songs but when I then unchecked the compilation box the album broke apart again. Is there another way to group the album other than to check compilation? Is it possible that if I had manually fixed the artist before importing that this album would have been put together properly even without checking "compilation"?