PISSED OFF AT ITUNES!!! I lost my ratings forever!!! WAHHHH!!!!! :-( :-( :-(

solrac

solrac

Mac Ninja
This is not fair!!!!!
I can never listen to my music the same way again!!!!

POS iTunes screwed everything up!!

I have 5,130 songs.
All the songs were on my internal HD.
On my iPod I also had 5,130 songs. Perfect synch.

Then, I moved (with the finder), all my songs to my new 200 GB Firewire 800 drive.

Then, with iTunes, I reanalyzed the music directory (which I changed to point to the firewire HD.)

Now, I had 5,130 songs on the Firewire HD, but only 4,938 on the iPod!!

"Some songs were not copied to the iPod because they cannot be played on an iPod".

GRRR!!!! It can't be a problem with the MP3s... they are the same songs which worked fine before!

Well I figured it out... the songs in the library which could not be copied to the iPod were pointing to the wrong files! They wouldn't play in iTunes either! When I right clicked on an affected song, and selected "show song file", it pointed to some HTML page inside "iMovie help". All those songs pointed to weird help files!

So I said screw it... I deleted ALL the songs out of my iTunes library.

Then I dragged all the songs back into it iTunes with the Finder.

Everything rebuilt itself fine, and now my iPod is almost perfectly synched again! (Still 8 songs missing from the iPod.)

EVERYTHING BUT THE RATINGS!!!!

ALL THE RATINGS ARE GONE!!

MY FAVORITE SONGS PLAYLIST IS RUINED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What the hell???? The ratings information is only stored in the iTunes Music Library.xml file. They are NOT stored on the song, like any other ID3 tag. Even lyrics (not supported by iTunes) are stored in the song like ID3 tags!!

WHY WOULDN'T ITUNES SAVE THE RATINGS INFO INTO THE SONG???!!!!

NOW I LOST ALL MY RATINGS!!!! If I backed up all my music to another hard drive, and had to recover it all after a hard drive crash, MY RATINGS WOULD BE ERASED EVERY TIME!!!!!

This is so bad, Apple... so bad... :-( :-(

My old iPod still has all my ratings. How would I go about recovering them from there? Thanks for any help....
 
This isn't going to make you feel any better, but with such a large amount of songs, why didn't you manually manage your iPod? Especially when you're going to be moving songs around from your hard drive library. It basically keeps your iPod and ITunes' libraries separate, so if you change one, you don't change the other unless you go in and make the changes yourself. You can still add/delete songs, just that you have to drag and drop into your iPod list.
And there are some apps that allow you to pull songs from your iPod back to your Mac, even in aac format. If you have ratings on your iPod, you can try and pull songs over and see if the ratings carry over to your hard drive (I can't say, because I don't use ratings that much).
I'm at work now, but let me see if I can find the app, from VT, I'm using. In the demo mode, you can pull 10 songs at a time. The shareware cost less than US$10, but it let me pull nearly 2,000 songs in a matter of minutes (mp3, aac, audible.com stuff) over to my hard drive when I recently went from a gen 2 10 gig iPod to a gen 2 20-gig model.
 
Here's a couple to consider

http://ipoding.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1312&mode=thread&order=0

http://www.versiontracker.com/mp/ne...=Quick&OS_Filter=MacOSX&search=iPod&x=16&y=14

I believe this is what I have, but I'll have to confirm when I'm at home as I've only used the app once. If not, this one sounds pretty good. The second link is for VT, so you can see comments on it.

http://www.scifihifi.com/podworks/


http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17443
 
Originally posted by solrac
What the hell???? The ratings information is only stored in the iTunes Music Library.xml file. They are NOT stored on the song, like any other ID3 tag. Even lyrics (not supported by iTunes) are stored in the song like ID3 tags!!

WHY WOULDN'T ITUNES SAVE THE RATINGS INFO INTO THE SONG???!!!!
Click to expand...
Because none of the versions of ID3 tags support ratings, and thus apple have chosen to store them in the xml file. I can empathise with you though, i have twice lost all my playlists and ratings because "my itunes library has become corrupt". It made me start again. I now back up my itunes files every week or so to a cool little usb drive and Synchronise Pro.
 
I know you posted in the wrong forum intentionally just to get more attention ;)
 
Won't work with the ratings, Randman. Like they've said, those aren't stored in the id3 tags.

solrac - take a look at your library.xml file in some text editor, see if the old ratings are still around or if iTunes totally rewrote the file. If the old ratings are still there, you can move 'em around. Will still be a pain in the butt, but it might not be as bad as going through all the songs in iTunes and re rating them. Most text editors let you move text around...and even if you use one that doesn't, copy & paste is still your friend. ;)

If it completely overwrote the old one, the line to add would be <key>Rating</key><integer>100</integer>. 'Course, put your own rating there...since it goes to 100, I'd guess it goes in steps of 20 for the stars...so one star would be 20, two would be 40, three would be 60, four would be 80, and all five would be 100. I'm just guessing there, but I'm pretty sure that's the way it works.

If you're wondering why you lost the ratings doing that, it's because iTunes uses the path to the song files as a reference as well as the file's ID...moving them doesn't normally mess things up, as iTunes can track the ID, but moving them to a different hard drive is essentially a copy and gives the file a new ID...so you have a different file ID AND a different path, so iTunes guesses that the song is a new file. I don't think there's a heck of a lot the iTunes programmers could do about that as it's more of a hardware issue than a software one.
 
Ok... if SONG LYRICS (which iTunes doesn't even support) and ALBUM ART IN JPG FORMAT can be saved inside the song (like an ID3 tag is)... THEN WHY CAN'T A 3 DIGIT NUMBER BE SAVED??!!!!!

WHY CAN'T APPLE JUST MAKE RATINGS AN ID3 TAG? They could create a new standard! Pretty soon other song programs would modify their programs to read "ratings"!!! It would be an iTunes only thing for a while, but it wouldn't matter! Other programs would simply ignore the "ratings" tag until they supported it!

So the whole hardware issue is BOGUS, Darkshadow! It's not a hardware issue, it's a software issue, because ratings should be written into the song file! Even if it's an Apple-only - iTunes-only tag!

WHY CAN'T IT BE A TAG???!!!!!

Podworks is awesome but it only moves the songs over. I need to get the XML file.... there's got to be an XML file in my old iPod right? Or else how does it know the ratings???

And I DO MANAGE songs manually with the iPod! I always make sure to leave it set on manual so it doesn't do anything I don't want. But if I want to synch the iPod then I just temporarily select automatically update songs, and let it synch up. It's the only way to synch... if I go manually I'll surely forget a couple songs!

Yes my entire XML file was re-written. I guess I'll be backing that up from now on...

And yes you are right... 20 = 1 star, etc.

Also, if Apple refuses to put ratings in the ID3 tags because it wouldn't be a "standard" (which is ridiculous because they can just be ignored), then they can still add a "move library to another hard drive" feature. Basically you'd select that feature, and then move the music library to the other hard drive through iTunes, and it would make sure to not overwrite ratings info in the new XML file, and keep the ratings with the appropriate songs based on ID3 tag name or filename. UGhhhHHH!!!
 
no way... this is horrible. The ratings is how i mainly listen to my music. I have "Best of" playlists for every genre. Those are all GONE now.

Well, I have my ratings from my old iPod, so I'm going to manually re-rate everything I guess (by comparing the old playlist to the new library).... at least I only had 700 songs rated, so if I can click on 30 stars per minute, then it'll take me only 23 minutes to re-rate all those songs, plus 2 hours of spacing out or not consistently clicking on 30 stars per minute...

sigh....
 
Solrac, just take a qualude and try to make your list again. I agree, this is absurd, I can't figure why they're gone either, but your ratings are off and shouting in caps is not bringing them back. Muhaahahahahahah :p
 
The ratings is how i mainly listen to my music. I have "Best of" playlists for every genre. Those are all GONE now.)... at least I only had 700 songs rated
Click to expand...

Well, your original post said more than 5,000. Now it's down to 700? :confused:
I see from your original post that it appears you have hard drive space to spare, but why have the same songs on your iPod and your hard drive? I only have about 60 gig of space on my hard drive/external, but I still only have a fraction of the mp3s from my 20-gig 'Pod on my drive. I can always play songs from the iPod over iTunes or re-import them back, if I need to.
But I agree with Toast. It bites that you lost something you spent some time working on, but I don't see why Apple is being blamed.
This is not fair!!!!! I can never listen to my music the same way again!!!!
Click to expand...
Of course you can, you just have to go back and do a little work on it. Especially since you had such a small percentage impacted.
 
i have over 5000 songs, but I said luckily only 700 were rated.

Also, Apple is to blame. They can easily store ratings inside the mp3s, even if it's not a standard. Apple is known for perpetuating new standards anyway, and a ID3 Rating Tag would be a perfect example!!!
 
Hate to play "Devil's Advocate" here but, why is Apple to blame for you not backing up important files?

And as far as the Ratings in ID3 tags, I have to wonder how many people actually use ratings. I mean, I'm sure if enough people did and let Apple know, via feedback they might be inclined to add Ratings to the ID3 tags.

Seriously, I feel for you. That really sucks. But I think it sucks that you're blaming Apple for your lack of taking precautions and not backing up stuff that is so important to you.

I really hope you don't take this too seriously and take offense to what I've said. Just voicing my opinion.
 
Although I agree with you a bit there, cybergoober, why should anyone have to backup their stuff? Computers are meant to work..
 
Originally posted by RPS
Although I agree with you a bit there, cybergoober, why should anyone have to backup their stuff? Computers are meant to work..
Click to expand...

Because, inevitably $#!t happens. This is a fact. The real question is, if something is very important to you why wouldn't you back it up? I mean, if it's that important to you wouldn't it be a good idea to have a copy of it somewhere?
Look, I was by no means flaming Carlos (major ASSumption on his name on my part). I was just putting things into perspective. I think a lot of us take simple things like backing up important files for granted... until something like this happens. It is a shame it takes something like this to make you realize it, though.

Also take into consideration that this is the Tech Support guy in me coming out. Especially given my work environment (NASA) where the main product of our center is research, i.e. data. Backups are invaluable. Yes sometimes it's a pain in the @$$ to take the time (depending on how much you want backed up) to do it. But when something like this does happen (and it's not a matter of "if", but "when") it's nice to know you have a copy to revert to. Even if it's not completely up-to-date, at least it's not a total loss.
 
Although I agree with you a bit there, cybergoober, why should anyone have to backup their stuff? Computers are meant to work..

Everything is meant to work when it is built, but rarely does anything continue on indefinitely without any problems.

Would you go through life without Health insurance? Buy a car that didn't come with a warranty?

Most wouldn't do that, but most would go without backing up when it comes to computers, BIG MISTAKE.

No one HAS to backup their stuff, but if they value it, and it's not replaceable, they would be very foolish not to. I always tell people the number one rule in computing is BackUp. It's simple to do and can be done without notice.
 
I think he was being sarcastic when he said "why should you backup your stuff".

Anyway... I DID BACK IT ALL UP!!!!!! WHEN I DRAGGED THE MUSIC FOLDER OVER TO THE NEW HARD DRIVE, I DRAGGED OVER THE PREFERENCES AND XML FILE AS WELL!! It still got re-written by iTunes though... sigh...

both copies now have no ratings.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top