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August 1, 2011

iTunes rant of the day (, )

by fluffy at 10:09 AM

I am trying to store my iTunes library on a NAS again, but this is really painful. iTunes seems to insist on normalizing every Unicode character in my library differently every time, and gets confused when there are a bunch of different folders on the NAS for a single artist or album just because there's Unicode in the name. Attempting to fix it via changing the "sort artist" field or the like doesn't really help much, either, because when I change half the songs the other half go "missing."

To make things even worse, iTunes has no way to show just the files it thinks are missing, and none of the various iTunes help threads out there are ever answered by anyone who seems to understand what the problem is.

It would be nice if iTunes didn't try to be so anal about naming its files exactly how it's listed in the id3 tag, and further if it would provide an easier mechanism to reattach to missing files en masse. The fact there's no way to say LOOK ALL THESE FILES ARE IN THIS DIRECTORY is simply flabbergasting.

Basically, iTunes still really fucking sucks.

Comments

#14091 08/02/2011 06:48 am Preach it brother!
I'm stuck with the damn thing with so many Apple ecosystem devices, but man does iTunes suck nuts.
#14092 08/02/2011 07:29 am
iTunes was only designed to use local storage in the native format of what it's running on. OS X enforces NFD, while a lot of systems default to NFC. Blame the Unicode specification for providing four different kinds of normalisation, and not explicitly saying when they should be used.

I assume it's a Linux based NAS? If so, you might be able to alter the samba config to use NFD.

Edit Checking http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/unicode.html suggests that Samba 3 can't support OS X's UTF-8 file names fully at all. So if it's a Samba based NAS, you're out of luck, because iTunes will always try to rename it to the 'correct' name, and when it contains a character that isn't consistently normalised between NFD and NFC discover the file is 'gone' because Samba saved it with it's idea of how UTF-8 filenames work. Again the blame on this rests on there being no consistent 'right' way to normalise UTF-8.
#14093 08/02/2011 08:43 am
I actually connect to it via AFP rather than SMB. The vendor is very aggressive about updating their particular AFP implementation, but it seems to be that the internal fllesystem has the names getting normalized in different ways.

For now I guess I can live with my library being on my Mac mini again - it's just that it's rather large and if I end up putting an SSD in it (which I probably will at some point) then I'll still have to figure out a better solution. Hopefully the legendary secondary drive bay SATA cable will be available as a service part by then.
#14094 08/02/2011 09:16 am
It's funny, I was thinking the last line of that post until I got to the last line...

It does continue to amuse/annoy me that such a simple thing, playing and organizing music, which so many computer users do, continues to be basically shitty across all platforms.
#14096 08/02/2011 09:57 am
Also, Lamar, while the root cause might be different Unicode normalization schemes, it would be nice if iTunes had a means of disabling Unicode in filenames to begin with (or normalizing it to 7-bit ASCII or whatever). Not everything is OSX, and you'd think especially a cross-platform app like iTunes would realize that.
#14097 08/02/2011 03:52 pm
fluffy: You may be interested to know the following part number: 922-9560 ("Bottom Hard Drive Flex Cable"). They're currently in short supply online, as a bunch of Internet nerds have just figured out how useful they are.
#14098 08/02/2011 04:00 pm
Ooh, excellent. Although I suspect it'll be a while before I feel justified in adding an SSD anyway, and it might just be easier to hook it up via FW800 (sure, that'll only do at most 100MByte/sec but that's plenty - it's more the latency I'm trying to cut down on, since that's what kills Logic's performance normally).

Too bad hooking up a USB drive to my Airport Extreme won't actually allow me to back that up via Time Machine, since that's the only thing stopping me from just using the AE as a media NAS.
#14100 08/03/2011 06:26 am
I use a USB drive on my Airport Extreme as a TimeMachine target. Is there an issue I don't know about?


fluffy:
Ooh, excellent. Although I suspect it'll be a while before I feel justified in adding an SSD anyway, and it might just be easier to hook it up via FW800 (sure, that'll only do at most 100MByte/sec but that's plenty - it's more the latency I'm trying to cut down on, since that's what kills Logic's performance normally).

Too bad hooking up a USB drive to my Airport Extreme won't actually allow me to back that up via Time Machine, since that's the only thing stopping me from just using the AE as a media NAS.
#14101 08/03/2011 09:25 am
Other way around - I'm talking about having my USB drive on an AE be backed up to SOMEWHERE ELSE, automatically. Just because a disk is attached to a NAS doesn't mean it won't fail too.