an iTunes question

UPGRADE! UPGRADE! get 10.3, for your own sanity. you'll find *everything* starts working.

so sometimes when i burn CDs (on my macbook, if it matters) the disc will burn & then after the computer spits it out an error message pops up that says "burn failed because of a medium write error" or something to that effect & i can't find a rhyme or reason as to why some mp3s will burn to disc and others won't. i know this is prob pretty vague but can anyone shed some light?

cuz i'm tired of wasting blank discs

That would not be due to the mp3s necessarily, but due to your drive or discs being bad.

word, alright

do you have Toast? you may be able to get a 3rd party disc burning application to work.

Let's say I want to make a mix.

A) I cobble all my songs from various albums in my iTunes
B) I organize them in a playlist

Now, I want to copy the whole thing so I can give them all a new album name in addition to keeping the originals with the original album).

How do I do it?

do you have a Mac?

wait you mean you want to copy the actual files? or you want to copy their entries in iTunes?

cause if it's the latter i'm not sure why you'd want to do that. just keep them in the playlist. if it's the former, and you have a Mac, you can use this - http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=filestofolder

Whiney, use the Grouping tag. It's ridiculous to have multiple copies of one song on different albums. That's what the metadata is for, use it!

But I want to share a mix with friends and have an album name on it

like i want to zip it up and pass it along as a unique album

with unique art and a new track listing

DO YOU HAVE A MAC

if so use this to copy the selected files in iTunes to a new folder:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=filestofolder

the use this:

http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MediaRage.html

(or something like it) to amend the tags

i have a mac

i have a pc but i would copy them to a new folder, select them in iTunes then right click > "Get Info" (i think?) > change the album name.

yeah i think that's what i'm gonna have to do. annoying that i have to make and delete a whole folder tho

oh. you should use a 3rd party tagging app. use the dougs script to copy files to folder and use an ID3/metadata editor to change the info outside itunes. good question though. you could use one of the Dougs Scripts to 'swap this with that' and put the Original album title in another tag, such as grouping/comments field, then give them a new album title and artwork. When you're done just rerun the script to replace the comments/grouping field with the album title and you're back to where you started.

probably less annoying then re-tagging them, and then re-tagging them again to put them back with their original albums

tru

the dougs scripts retagging process is very fast and easy. I use them alll the time.

this makes me wonder - is there something that would let you search for duplicates (eg. dupin) and then keep one file for multiple albums (ie. I like to keep multiple version of a given song not to disrup comps or greatest hits). Am I making any sense?

Why is it that iTunes is more likely to play a song on shuffle if you've recently played that song, despite no settings telling it to favor more recently played tracks? Maybe I keep missing a setting that controls that.

??? I know Apple jokes about having to fix the random shuffle system by making it less random, but maybe I'll be surprised to find out that the patterns I think I've been seeing for years with it are just coincidental.

Thanks everybody...

i've never found any settings for itunes shuffle, i think it's meant to be a bit of a black box but it's certainly not completely random. i've often suspected, by it's behavior, that it notices when you skip through a song and adjusts it's behavior accordingly, but this is entirely conjecture. so maybe if you pressed "next" every time a song popped up that you'd already recently played, it would stop doing it so much?

i find genius way more useful than shuffle anyway. it's great for when a friend that only really likes genre X and not all my other varied oddball tastes comes over, i just find a song/group i know they like, hit play then genius. it's uncanny, the rest of the night they'll be going "oh shit, i love this song!" every 10 minutes, happens every time.

Yeah! Genius does work very well, I was just kind of baffled about shuffle. If it has a method, there should be a way to control it. I'd love to reverse its tendencies and have it avoid a track based on how recently it was played, the same way you can toggle a smart playlist.

--> party mix (or whatever it's called these days) feeding off smart playlist "not played in last XX"

i'd generally regarded Genius as kind of worthless but messaihwannabe's idea of using it to create a quick playlist for company is pretty inspired

yeah - I also use Genius when I want ambient-ish stuff for reading.
Never really got the point of the Genius Mixes (pre-set by genre) though.

I'm pretty sure shuffle makes up its mind before you hit "next." Creepiest for me is when the next song is tangentially, but obviously, related to the one before it. Say, a Skynyrd track coming after "Southern Man." Or a track from the Max Roach/Cecil Taylor duo record following "Brilliant Corners." It's like there's a critic living in my iTunes.

it probably is truly random. don't underestimate the human animal's ability to divine patterns from random noise. it's what we do, and it's hard to turn it off. also consider the fact that if you weren't a pattern-seeking creature... music would just be uninteresting noise.

Well I've been aware of the human pattern thing so I've only come to this conclusion after observing the probability of a song being played based on the date it was last played over a few years, and I'm finally giving in to thinking that its not a coincidence.

ok, so. I have just imported an mp3 into itunes. part of an album. all tracks on the album play fine except this one, which gets to around 1min in (out of 4mins) and automatically skips to the next track. if i try to start it after the skip point it lasts about 10 secs before skipping forward.

what is happening. why is it happening. how do i stop it. if i can't stop it who do i kill.

The MP3 is broken. Rip it again.

how can mp3s "break"?!

sigh

I have this quite often and just have to rip or download again. Could be a mark on the CD?

it uhhh wasn't a cd :/

Record your 8-track again

Remove the fluff from your gramophone needle, reconnect it to the doohickey and try again.

Get Jedward to stop in at your house and finish singing it.