Tonight I’m trying to import my MP3 collection into a new iTunes install (10.5.0.142) on top of a fresh OS (Windows 7) install. I’ve had troubles in the past with this: Duplicated albums and songs, songs getting moved to different albums, etc. So I decided to import a couple albums at a time and keep a really close eye on it as it progresses.

The first two or three artists imported just fine, but on the 4th one (Dada, two albums) I noticed that the songs were all mixed together and the album titles were lost. Worse, I looked in the file system and saw that instead of two album folders there were now three, the new one called “Unknown Album” now contained all of the mp3s that belonged in the other two real albums. On one hand I’m very glad that I decided to do this bit by bit, but on the other hand…THIS IS VERY ANNOYING!

So, I removed the songs from iTunes (careful to keep the files) and moved the MP3s back where they belonged. Then I turned OFF the “Keep iTunes Media folder organized” option under Edit->Preferences->Advanced. This stopped iTunes from moving my mp3s to “Unknown Album” BUT it still didn’t bring the Album into iTunes so I was stuck with the prospect of figuring out which song belonged to which album and editing a LOT of data. Not good enough!

So I started searching for answers.  After a bit of searching around I found this thread which gave me something to try: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2807880?start=0&tstart=0

Sure enough.  If my MP3s were encoded by iTunes 9x then they lose the album data on import to iTunes 10.  Wow, very annoying but at least I have something to go on.  After a bit of testing I’ve found I can get them to import correctly if I remove the “Encoded by” tag whenever that tag is iTunes 9.

At this point I’m going to upgrade to iTunes 10.5.1 and see if that helps.  If not maybe I should really be done with iTunes…

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Posted by Greg on November 18th, 2011 :: Filed under Uncategorized
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