[Tango-L] Tango music and I-Tunes

[Ralph J. Hangleiter]

Hi,
Trini's problems are a bit easier to address than Susan's, as "songs  
being all over the place" is not really a good description of the error.

itunes works in the following way:
You have a library (file), where itunes notes which songs you have and  
then you have the actual songs as files on your hard disk. You can  
select yourself in the settings, whether you want itunes administer  
the music or do it yourself.

Automatic Administration by itunes:
If you set the option "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" in the  
"Advanced" settings, then itunes orders the files into folders by  
artist, album and names the files based on the disc number, track  
number and the song title. Example:

Lunfardo is title 3 on disc 1 of album  "Live in Colonia" by Astor  
Piazzolla & Quinteto Tango Nuevo:

This will result in your Library folder:
Level Folder:
1 Total Library
2  Astor Piazzolla & Quinteto Tango Nuevo
3       Live In Colonia, 1984 (CD 1)
             1-03 Lunfardo.mp3

If you want, there is another option which says "Copy files to itunes  
Media folder	 when adding to library". This means if you get files  
from somewhere and add them to itunes, then they are copied in the  
itunes Media Folder, the original file still exists. But then you have  
two copies. If you want, you can delete the first one, because you  
still have the second copy and itunes will work with that.

If you administrate yourself, then do not set the option, and then you  
can create your own folder structure and itunes is just going to note  
in its library file where you keep the file you just added to itunes.  
Which means it will take the path of the file on your hard disk, i. e.  
in which folder it resides, and add that to the file information in  
the library file. However, if you now go and move a song - you need to  
inform itunes about this. Because itunes still knows only the old  
address - so like when you move yourself, you need to make sure mail  
gets forwarded, in this case itunes will complain next time you want  
to try to play this song and say it couldn't find it - and you  
hopefully remember where you put it.

So Trini, it would be perfectly possible to work in itunes the same  
way as in the Windows Media Player, and no, you do not need to keep  
two versions of the same song. You just need to tell itunes that you  
want to do this work yourself.

As to the mess existing in the information of the songs (the so called  
tags for fields like artist, album, year, genre, etc), if it has been  
put in purely manually, and now everything is messed up sounds a  
strange - why should that happen?
However, if you rely on the database (when you put in a new CD to  
digitize the songs, and after a short time the names "automagically"  
appear, what happens is that itunes computes a special number from the  
information it has on the CD (like number and length of the titles)  
and then looks up the CD in a database. That database is run by a  
company called gracenote and the information of the CDs is mainly put  
in by users. So it is not the record labels giving you that  
information. Therefore there are also quite often some typographical  
errors, or just plain mistakes. Especially with Tango CDs, which are  
not quite mainstream, it can happen quite often, that something is  
mislabeled or has the wrong date/composer/artist whatever.

So you should carefully check what itunes comes back with from the  
information. And yes, if you want to have a properly tagged library,  
that means quite a lot of work.

Hope that sheds some light on the issue - for more questions, contact  
me with private mail.

Kind regards from the Istanbul Tango Ritual festival
Ralph
Munich, Germany