Post: iTunes Issues
In anticipation of my hopefully-imminent Switch™ to a Mac, I’ve been thinking about how to transfer my pictures, my music and my life (</melodrama>) over to a Macintosh. This causes me some small amount of consternation, as I’d really like to preserve as much metadata about my files as possible in the process – hey, if I’m going to be able to search it, I might as well keep as much as I can.
For my photos, this shouldn’t be too bad, thanks partly to EXIF data, partly to Flickr. Slight issues start when I start thinking about my music, however.
I use iTunes for my music needs whenever practical (when under Linux, I use amaroK). As you may well know, iTunes does loads of funky stuff with metadata, hence I have playlists for (say) all the tracks I rather like but haven’t listened to in the past month. As I’ve found out from a couple of corrupt library files, however, iTunes isn’t very good at remembering play counts, even when you explicitly give them to it in a library file. This neatly kills off the functionality of some of my more useful playlists.
Enter a solution: iPodRip. This little beauty lets you pull all your music data off your iPod (which, naturally, synchronises its play-counts with iTunes) and saves your metadata along with it.
Except (and I’ve just thought of this) my iPod is currently FAT32-formatted: my Mac isn’t going to read that, is it?
Bugger.
Any suggestions?
yes, it will. perfectly. And why must you copy your music across? why just not play it over the network? I had the same discussion with the mrs a few nights ago, she wanted to copy my music, i explained that she didnt need to, and that all my music was shared on the network anyway, but she still wanted to copy it? meh. women
I’m nigh on certain that the Mac will read FAT32, because the iPod Shuffle only operates with FAT32 (it doesn’t have the option of formatting to the normal mac filesystem).
From a random bit of commenting at iPodLounge:
I agree with Ben — I doubt it will be an issue. After all, Linux can read pretty much anything and a lot of Mac users won’t settle for having less than the functionality they are used to on *nix machines.
Reminds me: I never understood the etymology of “nix”. For a start, if it’s a regular expression it should be “.nix”, and if it’s meant as a shell expansion, “Linux” doesn’t match.
</geek>
I think I can explain David. Before computers there was a language called English. It was spoken by lazy buggers with no respect for logic and consistancy. For those tribal savages, the asterisk could represent any number of letters in a lazy abbreviation.
It’s believed that some secret societies still speak the English language, but none of them know how to use Linux so it’s never really come up.
Please don’t make me kick you in the face…
Before Fatty turns violent, a question: in Windows (oh horror oh horrors!) when you view the properties of an image, and it details keywords and authors, is that the same as EXIF data; and so too with music files, are the properties given akin to ID3 information?
Just curious
Kind Regards
I believe so, yes.
Yes. Windows has native ID3 (and the equivilent tagging in WMA files) and EXIF reading support. As well as being able to view them in the properties dialog, you can also add ID3/EXIF fields as columns in “Detailed View” (which is quite handy, if slow to load as it must interrogate each file).
Thanks guys. You are, as ever, fonts of all knowledge
Kind Regards