An iTunes bug… um feature

iTunes is a pretty good music library.  Its nice to look at, it seems stabler than some of the other alternatives with very large libraries (sorry WinAmp fans) and its never, in the time I’ve used it, managed to corrupt its databases or lose files or do anything else really nasty.

However, there’s an annoying quirk in the way iTunes handles its ‘add folder to library’ feature that means you can end up with the same file being added multiple times.

Say you have thousands of tracks in your library.  You probably have the ‘copy music to…’ option switched off.  If you don’t, you should – unless you’re buying those tracks from the iTunes Store, adding them to the library will take a lot longer with this option on, as iTunes is physically copying the file when you add it to the library, rather than just adding a reference to an internal database.  This option being on also means your library takes up twice as much disk space since there’s one copy in the iTunes folder and one in the file’s original location.

You have a bunch of folders.  Folders for albums, then for artists, then – in my case – folders for the stores I got the music from.  (I usually organise by the store I bought it from, because that’s the one piece of information a lot of mp3 tags omit and you sometimes really need.  And because with a 60 000 song library you need to stricture it somehow – opening that folder is going to take a lot of time to happen with 10 000 or so albums right there to display.)  So I have an Amie Street folder which contains a bunch of folders named for artists and bands, which in turn contain folders named for albums, which contain mp3s.  All very normal and familiar, right?

So I buy some music, three albums, say.  I want to add the new music to my library and do this the quickest way I can.  I download three new albums and put them in the Amie Street folder.  In iTunes, I go File – Add Folder To Library and iTunes rescans the whole Amie Street folder, picks up those albums, and adds them to the iTunes library and I go and find them in Recently Added (because I’m me, so I’ve forgotten the names in the thirty seconds it takes to do this).  Sounds complicated?  Not really, and it saves time once you have the routine.  I could add the three albums one at a time, as individual album folders, but I don’t, because that takes time, three times as many clicks, and iTunes is perfectly able to scan the entire Amie Street folder and only add those tracks it hasn’t seen before.

Seems like a good idea, right?

Um, no. Unfortunately iTunes sometimes adds tracks more than once.  It picks up the old tracks and adds a second copy.  Sometimes music added to the library months ago, so it takes me a while to notice – usually I don’t see it until I next search for a particular album and play it through and notice the duplicates.  And strangely, it’s usually duplicates, not three or four copies.  This is a strange problem, and its been annoying me for months.  I couldn’t see why it was happening, and couldn’t make the error happen consistently (which, as we should all know, is what makes it a bug and not just a user error).

So, duplicate songs, no apparent reason, making my library all untidy.  This is bad.

Today I got annoyed enough to spend an afternoon trying to fix it, and turns out this is what it is: iTunes thinks an mp3 with lyrics or album art added is a different file to the one with no lyrics or art.  So you add a song, add art, rescan the folder, and iTunes sees the file as a different one and re-adds the track again.  You end up with two files, one with the art, one without.  If this is the source of your problems, its easy enough to check – do Find Duplicates in iTunes and see if the only difference in your duplicates is the dates added and presence or absence of art and lyrics.

Oh, and welcome to the nightmare land of Find Duplicates and manual deleting.  iTunes handles this well.  Really well.  Is it so hard to assume the same track on different albums – with different lengths, from different files – aren’t duplicates?  You must have done this sorting game before, going through the list: That one’s a live version, this one’s an actual duplicate.  A thousand times over.  Oh fun.

That’s the problem.  That’s what iTunes was doing.  It was consistent, it was replicable – and it was an absolute monster of a problem because I’ve run the iTunes Get Album Art command and I’ve run an add-on lyrics finder multiple times and I have no idea when.  No idea any more what’s been changed and what hasn’t.

See the problem here?  Any new album I add anywhere on the computer now has to be added manually, only the album folder, because I don’t know where the ‘changed’ mp3 files are.  Or I can go through every so often and fix iTunes’ duplicates after I add art.

Anyway, if you’ve got to this blog from google looking for a fix, sorry, I don’t have one.  No fix, but there is a workaround.  It takes a bit more time than rescanning whole folders, but not as much as manually adding folders one by one.   Instead of letting iTunes add everything and then deleting duplicates, you can add to the library only the folders that contain new music by dragging them.  At least in Windows world.

Go to the music folder.  Add your music – unzipping or copying or whatever.  Write down the names of any artist folders you ‘this file already exists’ errors on.  In the music folder, change the view to Detail view.  Sort by Date Modified – click it twice and the most recent folders will come to the top of the list.  These are the ones with the new music in.  Open iTunes.  Select the new music folders and drag them to iTunes (by dragging down to the iTunes taskbar icon which will open the iTunes window), then dragging to the Library item (the capitalised one at the very top) in the navigation panel on the left.  If you drag to the Library item, the new albums get added to the library.   If you drag to a playlist, the albums get added to the playlist – which may or may not be what you want.  Lastly, go to the artist folders you wrote down earlier and add the individual albums the same way.  These won’t be included among the ones you just added as the folder was created the other day, when you first bought that artists’ work, not today.

That’s the only way I know of to get around this bug/quirk.

This is on a PC, but I assume Macs have much the same options.  Seems to me Apple didn’t think enough before they did this design.  Like maybe iTunes has been far more successful than they ever imagined.  Like maybe they just didn’t think people would have 60 and 100 GB libraries and would have directory hierarchies in place to organise those, and so would always have the ‘copy music to…’ turned on.

Nah.

Hopefully they fix it in iTunes 8.  Here’s hoping.

(On the subject, and as an aside, I shouldn’t need to add that once you’ve imported the song into iTunes you never move it or iTunes will lose track of its location and you’re going to be spending a lot of time clicking on the More Info screen to tell iTunes where it is now.  Just don’t.)

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Julie London, actually – beautiful smoky-smooth old-school jazz from way back when.  She’s here on emusic.  The Essential album is a good starting place – its littered with standards, and the first track, Cry Me A River, is probably her best-known song.