iTunes Question

April 5, 2004 10:33 AM

YAiQ (Yet Another iTunes Question): Why is there a bunch of hexadecimal junk in my Comment fields? Venture within for further elucidation of my quandary...

So setup this cool "mood tagging" system for myself that uses the Comment field and dynamic playlists. All well and good, but lately my comment fields have been filling up with this nonsense: 0000028E 000002A7 00000A50 00000B30 00007547 00007547 00006237 0000624F 00007575 00007547 etc. Anyone know what's going on? Google has come up empty so far...

posted by dragstroke to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

I have those on some of my iTunes tracks as well. No idea where they come from.
posted by werty at 11:02 AM on April 5, 2004

You know, I'm a big iTunes fan, or want to be. I have 15,000 tracks ripped into its database (or downloaded from the Music Store). Though it's slower than having a collection of 1,000 tracks, the library remains surprisingly nimble.

Despite my willingness to adore iTunes, I can't. It's one of the buggiest pieces of software with which I've worked. It's maddening sometimes: iTunes crashes and loses the database. I restore the database, but the play counts are lost. It gets stuck while downloading songs from the Music Store, and I have to contact support to get things squared away. Before I perform a major operation (burn a disc, purchase music), I makes sure that all of my work is saved and unused apps are closed because I know that there's a good chance iTunes is bringing the G5 to its knees.

Also, iTunes lacks some critical features. Why can't I crossfade between tracks? Why can I search by some fields but not others? (I have every song tagged with the year it was recorded — my collection nis heavy on music from the first half of the twentieth century.) How about an undo feature?

So, I adore iTunes in fits and starts. I love the ease with which I ripped my entire CD collection (and the collections of all my friends, natch), I love the integration with the Music Store (and Acquisition, natch), I love the the speed with which I can search my database. I love smart playlists.

I love iTunes. Except when it crashes.
posted by jdroth at 12:34 PM on April 5, 2004

Response by poster: Well, I've determined that my comment info is still in the file someplace, it's something to do with how iTunes is reading it. I pulled a "corrupted" file into a place where I could do a strings command on it and found the real contents of my Comment mood tag. I've tried clearing the Library and re-adding the files, which actually tripled the number of "corrupted" files! Argh!

jdroth, I know where you're coming from -- I spent a lot of time designing my playlist system and tagging all these files. This love affair will end if I can't get it fixed....

I might get some help direct from Apple since I have a friend with contacts, though. *fingers crossed*
posted by dragstroke at 1:06 PM on April 5, 2004

jdroth -- are you running the Windows version of iTunes? The Mac version has crossfading. Listed under prefs->effects.

And both versions have smart playlists and you can collect songs by any field it captures.

I only have 3000 songs and am not weird codes in the comments and it doesn't crash.
posted by birdherder at 3:11 PM on April 5, 2004

birdherder, I'm using the Mac version of iTunes. You're right that there's a crossfading option, but it's a global option (applied to all songs) and it's only for playback. What I want is crossfading for songs I burn to CD, and I'd strongly prefer crossfading defined for each transition. EZ CD Creator for the PC — which isn't a great program by an means — has awesome crossfade controls. I don't need anything that fancy, I suppose, but something would be better than nothing.
posted by jdroth at 5:07 PM on April 5, 2004

ahh... ok.
posted by birdherder at 5:45 PM on April 5, 2004