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Adding wav files to iTunes Library

M

martintyler

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 9, 2005
27
0
I am just starting with iTunes and already have a large collection of CDs ripped to wav files using an Artist/Album/Track Title.wav format.

Is there any way for iTunes to use this information? I cannot find any option for this, it simply looks for files and adds those with blank info for the Artist and Album.
 
I don't know if there is an automatic way, but a more simple way is to group songs...

Say, you have 4 different albums by Artist: Macrumors Raps, yo! then you to Command-I and in the Artist field of those four albums you type Macrumors Raps, yo!

Then you can change the album name...
 
That still means doing it by hand which isnt much fun with hundreds of albums.

Seems fairly limited, plenty of other applications parse directories in this manner.
 
martintyler said:
I am just starting with iTunes and already have a large collection of CDs ripped to wav files using an Artist/Album/Track Title.wav format.

Is there any way for iTunes to use this information? I cannot find any option for this, it simply looks for files and adds those with blank info for the Artist and Album.
Click to expand...
I am not sure I understand what you want. If you are simply trying to add your .wav song files to iTunes, then try dragging one of the .wav song files on to the iTunes icon in the dock. If iTunes opens up and adds that song, you can then drag a folder of song files to the iTunes icon and it will add all songs in that folder.

If you are trying to get iTunes to rename or relabel your existing songs using the ID3 data, then iTunes was not designed to do that. iTunes allows the user to add or edit ID3 data, but does not do so automatically itself. You can select multiple songs and edit the ID3 data (except song title) on all of them at once in iTunes. iTunes can use CDDB to get ID3 information for CDs (which is added to subsequently imported song files from that CD), but not for existing song files such as MP3s. For that you will need software that was designed to do that. The MusicBrainz website might help you.
 
What I want is not difficult, I cannot believe iTunes cannot do it.

Wav files do not have tags, i dont want to manipulate tags or rename anything, or manually edit 10,000 tracks to add in information that is already there in the path/filename.

Example.

I have a file Music/Air/Moon Safari/06 Remember.wav and i want to add that to itunes, it has no tags as it is a wav file, but the Artist, Album, Track and Title are all there, but iTunes ignores it.
 
martintyler said:
What I want is not difficult, I cannot believe iTunes cannot do it.

Wav files do not have tags, i dont want to manipulate tags or rename anything, or manually edit 10,000 tracks to add in information that is already there in the path/filename.

Example.

I have a file Music/Air/Moon Safari/06 Remember.wav and i want to add that to itunes, it has no tags as it is a wav file, but the Artist, Album, Track and Title are all there, but iTunes ignores it.
Click to expand...
I see. Well, iTunes was never designed to do that function (seperate song title into ID tag info). iTunes is designed to read the file name of a song file as the song title. iTunes is not ignoring the information, but probably reading it all as the song title, as it is designed to do, a correct implementation of its design function.

Seems to me that all the song information of your wav files is in the file name, therefore iTunes will read that whole file name as the song title. So which is the song title?, the artist name ("Music")?, album name ("Air")? etc.? Is the order the same in EVERY instance? Even for other people's files?

If it is not difficult and you know the way you want the information parsed, then write a script that does what you want. Or search on Google to see if someone else already has something available to help you.
 
The iTunes library looks to me like it keeps track of all this info independant of tags on a file once it is initially added to the library (maybe it re-checks them or something, but it still keeps its own seperate copy of the meta data). Also you can edit this info manually so to me this seems like an issue with adding data to the library in a useful way, rather than any major design difference.

I also wasnt suggesting itunes somehow guesses my directory structure, but this is a simple problem many other apps have solved with easy configuration.

This is a missing feature, not a major design difference as you make out - there is nothing in the existing itunes design which would prevent this working.

I have done a few searches and not found anyone who has made a script, so I may end up doing something myself. However, I dont know how itunes handles it if you make your own xml database, since it also has its own binary database.
 
Correct

You're 100% correct, Wav files do not have tags, iTunes merely keeps an associative database in the library. I don't know how to format this information into iTunes, but you should DEFINITELY leave some iTunes Feedback and request this feature. As far as I know, it is not doable as of iTunes 7.7 (yes, I know this is an old thread, but it comes up high in the google search for [iTunes Wav ID3]).

However, if you let iTunes manage your music, it creates an Artist\Album\Song.mp3 style directory listing, so I wonder if you could just move it there in that format and it would work? Very very doubtful.
 
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