iTunes gets/got confused if tracks have same name & length?

[mhschmieder]

I have encountered a huge bug in iTunes today that I can work around manually, because the database is corrupt. It's easy to see how the bug happened, because few if any of the people on Apple's iTunes team listen to classical music or understand anything about the genre at all.

I have two recordings of MacDowell's Piano Concertos, and it just so happens that the second and third movements of the first concerto are the EXACT same length. This is quite unusual, but should ALWAYS be anticipated by anyone who's actually qualified to work on software that includes classical music as potential data sources.

Whether I restart iTunes after "correcting" the track that gets assigned to the other album -- and one has a cello piece at the end, and fewer tracks, so it gets marked as a compilation -- or just scroll through iTunes by genre a few times, the tracks keep bouncing back and forth between the two albums, and their internal manually edited information even changes, which I didn't even think was possible as usually I have to force such edits even when they're desired!

If I look at file location for the two files, it is 100% the same, which is also impossible but probably the crux of the problem and behind all the other flakiness. Whichever part of the iTunes software relies on database lookup techniques is probably exclusively using track name and song length, and nothing else, as they key, and thus sending other parts of the software into endless loops with non-deterministic outcome.

The only thing that fixes this problem, is to change the track names for one of the two albums so that they are slightly different, such as removing the number sign before the concerto number. This then moves the database's sense of where the track is, the corresponding track count, and the year recorded, back to sanity with the rest of the album.

But the manually edited information about performing artists etc. and the notes field (where I type in details about additional performers and instruments), remains altered by iTunes itself (not me!) from its previous lookup confusion, until I edit it back again for the umpteenth time.

I am not going to restart iTunes yet again to see if this permanently fixes the problem. I had to use my ears to determine which track was which as well, based on acoustic signature of the recording hall and some timbral and articulation details of the piano and the soloists's style.

It would be REALLY easy to permanently lose data as a result of this bug.

[mhschmieder]

Nope; this is an endless circle of problems, as now the other two tracks self-updated with the wrong info and thus once again point to the same location on-disc.

I'm going to go to a backup drive now and see if I can resurrect the original copies of the files from the version I uploaded earlier, and then re-upload the ones from today after renaming the older tracks, as one can't rename during upload (as I discovered many years ago).

[mhschmieder]

Nope; permanent damage has been done, I think, unless I can find a more recent backup or figure this out via Time Machine.

Every time I start to play one of those two tracks, the other one jumps to where it is and changes its info. So it may be that when I uploaded the other album, the two tracks that had the same length and track name permanently deleted the older one, in spite of different artists, categorization, etc.

I may even have reported this bug a year ago, as it's starting to ring a bell.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Can you manually change the name of the tracks? It might be interesting to ask Siri "what's playing" to see if she agrees. I believe Sirs results are based on waveforms (not titles or lengths). Not that this will help you in any way, but it might be interesting.

Were these purchased from iTunes or imported? I'm guessing the later.

[mhschmieder]

The problem may be recoverable because it is slightly different than I thought, but the bug is a real bug and quite dangerous.

I found the original CD and noticed a different timbre and articulation with the pianist, so realized that the more recent upload was the one that got fouled up and that the old one (a corrupted CD that I had to load eight times to get to fully load; an issue I have with certain brands and the reason I finally started uploading all my CD's a few years ago as I now realize they aren't permanent as promised).

This is till going to take a few iterations of careful editing and uploading within iTunes and on my hard drive, to rationalize the two album contents and not cause a repeat of the problem, but at least now I have found a backup for the older two files and the original disc for the newer two files, so I can avoid permanent data loss even if this iTunes bug is a pain in the rear.

[mhschmieder]

MLC, manually changing the names of the tracks "appeared" to work until I played them, and then the other ones bounced over to the other album location and self-updated.

So I think it really is one file per concerto movement for the two that originally had the same track names and track lengths on the original CD's, and that there was some other aspect of iTunes database organizing that caused the foul-up that apparently ended up deleting two of them as redundant (not something I did!) while maintaining some very confusing metadata scheme that doesn't stay in sync.

Stay tuned, as I will soon see if I can re-load the original CD for the newer performance and keep the two straight on the second go around, by first renaming the older performances in order to avoid the track names being the same (album names the same but not the artists, as "MacDowell: Piano Concertos").

This is a real bug in iTunes though; not user error. Either a programmer took shortcuts where they shouldn't of -- probably to improve performance of database lookups by ignoring what they though to be information not relevant to distinguishing unique tracks -- or the metadata part of iTunes is broken.

The latter is almost more likely as we already know the metadata was broken a year or two ago during another update, but was at least partially fixed. That was when you could manually edit all the song info and it would bounce back after you saved your edits, unless you did some very specific things like type text in the info field, backspace to delete, and then specifically use either TAB or ENTER (vs. mouse) -- I forget which -- to magically trigger a proper save of the edits.

[mhschmieder]

Oh, I never buy on-line music due to compression and lack of liner notes and performer information. If that ever changes, I may consider it. I turn Siri off as well as I hate stuff like that. I guess she's available on the desktop but I've never tried.

Anyway, I'm about to try a fresh upload with a different editing sequence at my end to see if I can keep iTunes from making the same mistake the second time around.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

And what I find interesting, as well, is when I import a CD (almost always classical) I generally get a choice of several releases. These are often from different compilations or re-releases of the same recording.

But even worse for me at times is when i write a piece and put it into iTunes and the title and length match something in the CDDB, which will then insist it's some other title. Grrrrr!

If I could collect the royalties on those other titles as a result, I'd be more forgiving... lol

Also, another (tiresome) workaround would be to add a second of silence to one of the recordings, bounce that and add it to the librar. But yes, it's a bug and Apple must face!

As for Siri, she isn't allow to play with my Mac. Not at all! She can be such a cu... bitch.

[mhschmieder]

Whew! That worked. I've revised the title to be more generic, because I think it may be a bug that has been fixed, as I didn't have to do as many of the steps as I expected to today.

I had uploaded this CD last summer but had forgotten, so re-uploaded it again today to listen to it, as that's more reliable (and future-proof) than listening to the CD in real-time via a computer-based media tray. So I had canceled today's upload when it asked to overwrite files, but the stress and confusion of the overall situation meant that I had forgotten that, so the bug was probably in that version that I made complaints about a year or two ago.

Hopefully they have indeed fixed this problem, as seems to be the case from resurrecting the older two files from a backup drive and then re-importing the newer two files from the original CD (different album than the older two tracks; I threw that CD out due to its resistance to playing all the way through or even uploading everything on first try).

Of course, a lot of damage was done by a couple of faulty versions of iTunes, and one doesn't always find the damage until a year or more later, by which time it may be too late.

Obviously, that iTunes database and/or metadata management bug also could have an impact on one's original music, but fortunately I always tag a complete time date stamp as part of the file name of every mix or individual track export that I do on my own stuff.

[mhschmieder]

I've opened and closed iTunes a few times now, and the problem has not returned, so the re-import today, after restoring the other files from a backup disc and manually dragging them into the album within the iTunes GUI vs. using any other approach, seems to have circumvented any lingering bugs and avoided the endless-loop syncing issue that caused iTunes to think the tracks were the same.

[mikehalloran]

The outdated, creaky Grace Notes database is the real culprit and Apple’s reliance on it has issues. Without Grace Notes, too many user iTunes libraries would have hundreds of titles named Track 1 followed by hundreds of Track 2 and so on.

As you’ve seen, slight modifications will make iTunes stop querying it and defer to the info you entered.

[mhschmieder]

I agree. I even offered to help GraceNotes pro bono a few years back, but they weren't interested, so smug in their perfection and depth of knowledge (not!).

[labman]

Hey mhschmieder. Sorry to hear about your woes.

If I may offer an idea... We walked away from all things iTunes and have used jRiver for quite a while now. Not only is it far more customizable, but it reaches out to your interfaces and sets the sample rate according to the piece. Became increasing important to those of us in sync world, with all the higher rez stuff needing auditioned and printed for deliverables. I just love it. No more iTunes doing SRC on files. We hear everything native. Not to mention, we can use most of our daily plug-ins inside it.

[mhschmieder]

Oh, that's good to know about -- especially as I use iTunes for my own music organization when comparing mixes, as much if not more as for uploaded CD's.

I might have looked into jRiver many years ago, but time marches on, and it's worth revisiting things now and then. My most recent alternative doesn't exist anymore and didn't pan out anyway; it was some experimental competitor from Adobe. An orange interface as I recall.

[monkey man]

Mark, I meant to respond earlier but have been waiting for a window where I'm not blocked.

Silly / obvious idea really, but if you added a second of silence (in DP) to a track iTunes thought was a dupe, would that solve the problem?