ID3 tags / artwork confusion

Firstly I need to say that I do not use the iTunes library - I rip all my albums as highest quality mp3s in windows media player and store them as files. I then drag and drop the files I want straight onto my ipod thus bypassing the itunes library and the automatic download of artwork feature. So I then tend to add artwork to my ipod albums manually, however out of about 500 albums, around 20-30 of them already display artwork on the ipod. Where did this come from? I assume it was written into the files when I ripped them. NOw, when you rip files in Media PLayer and youre on the net, usually artwork will be displayed in a box with artist and album, so my question is does windows media player attach artwork information to individual mp3s when you burn them and if so how do you make the program do this all the time? Ande does this have something to do with tags?? Its real handy to drag music onto your ipod and have the artwork already there for you (without using itunes library!! and yes guys I know thats the easy option so please dont tell me that!)
thanks

richiejazz wrote:
++sycning is just so much less hassle. As you tidy your library, update artwork, tags etc. you just sync and every change will be carried on to the iPod.++
So does that happen vice versa too? Like if you edit something on iPod elsewhere then use it on your normal computer..
No, it's one way, from iTunes to the iPod. If you connect an iPod to another computer & manually add or amend a few tracks then next time you sync with your home library those updates would be lost.
I probably going to give in and start building up my iTunes library in the same image as my iPod - just in case I ever have to reload everything! (Although I think its stupid that you cant copy the contents of your ipod INTO your iTunes library.
The aim is to discourage casual piracy with the iPod as vector. iTunes can copy store purchases from the iPod, since it "knows" you have a licence for them. There are 3rd party tools that can copy other media from an iPod into the computer. You could use these, for example, to let you add some stuff to your iPod at work, then pull it into your library at home.
One question though - I have just added music to my library from my huge music drive and it took ages to load in and auto find all the artwork, BUT has all this music been physically copied across into iTunes/an iTunes folder? Its not just effectively short cuts to the original music files you wanted to add to the library is it (ie like winamp!)? I only ask cause I had some old videos from my iPod left in the library and I couldnt play them cause it said couldnt find original file....
It all depends on the options set when you imported your library. Select a track in iTunes and use CTRL-I to "Get Info". At the bottom of the Summary tab is a section showing where the file is located. iTunes can either add files by linking to their existing locations, or make copies inside it's own folder structure. If you have the option to let iTunes "Copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library" set then it will have created copies. While it's no bad thing to have a backup there are plenty of posts on this site along the lines of "Help! I've imported my music folder into iTunes to add some new tracks and now it's full of duplicates" to suggest a flaw with this mechanism. For this reason I choose to manually orgainse my music inside the iTunes Music folders before importing into iTunes. Likewise I choose not to let iTunes "Keep iTunes Music folders organised" and maintain control over the layout of my files.
tt2

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    * There is some weird meta data (ID3) behavior. I copied a few hundred MP3 files from the Mac drive back to the PC (over our home network) and looked at them in the Windows Explorer. The first thing I saw was that the same (wrong) music played for the bad tracks as had on the Mac. And I also saw that a lot of ID3 tags were not showing on the Windows side. Lots of tracks have no ID3 data (album, artist, genre, etc. is missing) when I look at them on the PC. There are many albums where tags show up correctly for some of the tracks but not for others. In fact, the number of files where the ID3 tags aren’t visible on the PC far exceeds the number of songs that play incorrectly on the Mac. When I look back on the Mac at the songs that have no ID3 data on the PC and do a Get Info, I see the ID3 data.
    * Often, though I can’t say always for sure, the wrong music that plays on the Mac is stuff that has been recently added. Either podcasts or music that my wife has added since the initial library was established.
    My best guess (though still full of holes):
    Something is confusing the Mac OS into writing on top of occupied space on the hard drive or into mapping files incorrectly in the drive’s allocation table, and chaos results. The Mac doesn’t think anything is wrong, and it shows everything as being clean in the Finder. So I started thinking about the kind of reads & writes my wife is doing on that drive. She rips new CDs to add to the library, she downloads new Podcasts and deletes old ones, and she changes ID3 tags.
    I’m focusing on the changing ID3 tag activity. My wife doesn’t like the way I tag genre. I like big broad categories, an she likes smaller, more specific categories. So she has gone through the initial library of 42K+ songs and changed the genre on thousands of songs. She’s change some from Pop to Power Pop or from Pop to Indie Pop or from Rock to Indie Rock, etc. Both WMP (where the tags were created) and iTunes support ID3v2.3, and so these two programs ought to be able to change tags in a totally interchangeable and safe way. But what if iTunes writes its new genre tags in a way that’s slightly different from WMP? Could iTunes be writing to memory/disk locations that are outside the boundaries of the file and thus creating some kind of buffer overrun?
    It really doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it does tie back to the evidence that this has something to do with meta data, gets worse over time, happened on more than one disk, and seems to be a file allocation table issue.
    Even if I get to the bottom of this, I think my wife’s HD is toast for sure. Here’s what I think I will do: I’ll reformat the drive, re-copy the music over from the PC, and build a new iTunes library. Then, first thing, I’ll open iTunes, select all the songs in the new library, and run “Convert ID3 Tags” to ID3v2.4. If that works and everything behaves correctly, I’ll try to change some genre tags and test the results. The problem is that the library is so large that problems can go undetected for a long time, so maybe I should do this first with a small subset of the music as a trial run.
    The thing I want to avoid is having to do this (ever) again, so I’d feel more comfortable if I understood the bug/problem before just following this guess (which feels like a roll of the dice). If anyone has seem similar behavior or has heard of any IDS incompatibilities between WMP 11 and iTunes 7, I’d love to hear about it. Any help is appreciated.
    Jim

    Wow, that was a long and detailed post. I haven't the energy to reply in equal fervor, but I will just say that lately these boards have been peppered with posts from people whose MP3s are being eaten alive by iTunes. What I don't get is why you suspect the hard drive is at fault. Unless the rest of the system is caving in, I don't think there's any reason to suspect a failing drive. Check the S.M.A.R.T. status in Disk Utility if you haven't already, and perform whatever maintenance you believe is in order.
    For the most reliable ID3 tag editing, I'd certainly recommend using foobar2000 on a Windows PC (or a Mac with Windows installed) or MP3Tag. I would definitely, at least for the time being, not put your huge music collection at risk by doing any further editing of the tags in iTunes.

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