anyone, this has gotten me stumped & google hasn’t supplied an answer yet..

SO I’m trying to add a folder of mp3’s (or the files individually), and itunes has decided to take a bath on the actual file, the length are different (3 mins instead of an hour), and or it fails to find the songs details (artist, album, etc).
Files are on my NAS, which is working fine, and has nothing weird on the folder/file names and folder are no deeper than any other folders.
Just to be sure everything’s been rebooted (NAS, router, power line plugs, computer and even itunes repaired [latest version]).
Though they add in fine, if I point itunes to them on my c drive, though the 88Gb 13000 odd songs on my NAS work fine (they cannot stay on the C drive).

Alternatives to itunes would be gratefully accepted, as it is really really rubbish, though they must work with my iphone….

I’ve not long deleted the whole library, as it had, over the last year, decided that none of the files were on the NAS drive.

Well it only finds the song details when you import a CD so it can check the CD code against the database. Other it won’t know what the song is.

When ever I add songs to iTunes I just do one folder at a time.

Alternatives to itunes would be gratefully accepted, as it is really really rubbish, though they must work with my iphone….

Winamp

Have you tried re-tagging the mp3s?

I use this

Maybe test it on 1 or 2 of them.

these are MP3’s with details already set, and I’m only trying to add one more folder (or song). Done it hundreds of time before but it just won’t have it today, and the fact that it’s being inconsistent (sometime it has an album name, I delete try again and it doesn’t have an album name) is leaving my very confused.

I assume you’ve unticked the box where iTunes tries to copy files into its own personal little collection:

Maybe your iTunes database is buggered in some way and won’t accept new data.
Some stuff here – http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/the-complete-guide-to-rebuilding-or-cleaning-your-itunes-library/

Nothing quick I’m afraid 🙁

the doubling up is an horrendous trait of itunes …

im gonna try streamlining all my music to single copies by uninstalling itunes …. then copying every bit of music into one folder – and pressing the do not make duplicate button.

then reimport and hopefulyl this will give me single copys of music / albums and only supply me with copys if the song is on 2 albums i own.

itunes has gone bananas with me keeping my music on an external HDD and putting it in and out all the time 🙁

itunes has gone bananas with me keeping my music on an external HDD and putting it in and out all the time

Yeah, don’t think thats a great idea – no database would like that, especially iTunes which has processes running in the background.
There is a TuneUp prog which can remove duplicates.

Don’t use Tuneup….. apparently the latest version is a disaster (and really expensive).

I used this the other day: tagalicious, which was about 2 quid and worked pretty well.

Tuneups always been a disaster

Cant see why my suggestion wont work to get rid of the bulk of the duplicates ?

Tuneups always been a disaster

Fine for me. just used the free version to clear up a bunch of dupes, then ditched it.
(But then all my tracks are tagged and I have no iTunes problems) 😛

Used TuneUp when I first put all my music into iTunes.
Fixed all the missing tags and successfully found artwork for a bunch of albums.

May have got worse since, but certainly was very useful for me.