Music Recovery From An ipod

Two nights ago I completely ruined my music library when I used a program called FixTunes. It’s a very nice program that will find album art, remove duplicates and scan each mp3 and check it’s ID3 data against a database and retag it correctly. It even scans the actual song and will try find to the correct tags. Very well thought out program except that my library consists of lots of various Indie music and the program just choked on it. My friend, Chris, that used it raves about it and said it worked perfectly for him. But my suggestion is to try it in manual mode first for alot of songs before you let it do it’s thing.

So now I’ve got a trashed library and my most recent backup is on my ipod. I sent a twitter help message out and got some great replies for things to use… thank you to all that helped! through those suggestions, the following is my free way of doing it (I couldn’t stomach paying for a program to fix what a paid program destroyed)

Clearing The Current Library
I made a backup of my current library just in case anything weird happened and then I deleted all my mp3′s from the music directory to start fresh.

ipod To Laptop
I was suggested many programs to try out and most of them were paid and looked to work very well. The free ones seemed to be PC only and I’m on a mac. I finally landed on YamiPod, which is both PC and mac and works without installing a program on your computer so it’s portable. You plug in your ipod and it lists your music… you then highlight everything and tell it how you want it to rebuild your files (artist/album/song.. etc). It worked perfectly and I now have a file structure better than I had before!

Purging
Spending all this time watching my music move from device to device and program to program I realized that there is a TON of music that I never listen to, nor will ever listen to. And some that was Untitled… that I just don’t care if it’s gone. So I went through and purged over 1200 songs and freed up a ton more space. It was mildly freeing to wipe a few of those artists :)

Import
Next up was just a straight import into iTunes. Nothing fancy. But I did take the tiem to go back through all the Artists one more time and purge a few more.

Album Art
iTunes has a nice feature for adding album art but because my library is somewhat varied there were still tons that don’t have it. Plus the iTunes feature never seemed to work really well with my mp3′s. It always kept dropping the album art as if it never added it to the mp3 itself. After some searches I downloaded Fetch Art (mac only). Holy cow. I had tried lots of various applescripts but nothing compares to this. My recommendation is to just do about 10 artists at a time as you need to quickly verify that it loaded the right album art before you send it to your mp3′s. It gets it right about 9 out of 10… even on Indie music.

Duplicates
I ran the applescript Dupin (mac only). But there are lots of good programs for this out there. I didn’t have many because I’ve run this program before and also my purging out cleared alot of issues.

Back To ipod
I restored my ipod and basically formatted the drive and started with a clean slate. Left it resyncing last night before bed and woke up to everything finished and ready to go!

I’d been wanting to clean up my library for about a year but never had the time to do it. I realize that most people could care less about what is on their ipod or laptop… but what can I say… I’m just weird. But at least I’m happy and weird now.