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vbmike73

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 8, 2008
149
3
Not sure what's going on here. I'm taking video files, mp4, of tv episodes. I had them in iTunes at one point, then for space reasons, moved them out of itunes to a external drive to keep, and deleted the files within iTunes. Now I'm trying to bring them back into iTunes. But before I do that, I'm renaming the files to a proper title so I can grab cover art, like Friends S01E14.mp4. I'm using Automator to do this. So it renames the files, or so I thought. When I bring them into iTunes, then I look at the file info, it still shows the original file name, not the new one. So it doesn't grab the right cover art. It's like I'm changing the outside appearance of the file name, but the heart of it still has the original; file name. Does this make sense???

I think it mainly has to do with the fact that I had them in iTunes previously. I get files and rename them all the time, and have no issues. Does iTunes still keep a "record" of that being in there, and still somehow knows it's the same file?
 

vbmike73

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 8, 2008
149
3
ok so two questions. How does one edit the ID tags, and second, why can I rename files in finder that have never been in iTunes, and it works just fine? Why wouldn't iTunes always show the original file name? It's only doing this for files that were already in there.
 

justperry

macrumors G5
Aug 10, 2007
12,558
9,750
I'm a rolling stone.
ok so two questions. How does one edit the ID tags, and second, why can I rename files in finder that have never been in iTunes, and it works just fine? Why wouldn't iTunes always show the original file name? It's only doing this for files that were already in there.


If you Edit Music in iTunes you are editing the ID Tags, so you change a Songs name, Artist, genre, it will all be edited inside the music file.

They most likely did not have any ID Tag Information yet and iTunes then get the name from the file.

FYI, just click on any field in a song in itunes and you can edit it, or click info and you can edit there, in the first view in edit it even shows you the version of the ID Tag.

Shortcut for info is Command-I on keyboard.
 
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