Software wish/design
I’ve been using iTunes again, and wishing for software that will fix my music library.
- I need software that will reconnect orphaned songs with media on the drive. In my case, this should be easy – my media has all been organized by iTunes, so the songs are supremely easy to find. (They are in a directory tree structure, organized by artist, then by album, and finally they are stored with filenames as a two digit track number followed by the track name. A few of them have an additional digit indicating that they are a first, second, or third duplicate of the file, which is so rare as to approach irrelevance – perhaps not to the programmers writing the file handling code, but to the user who needs his or her songs un-orphaned.)
- I need software that will merge every set of songs in my library that point to the same file, so that each entry in a list of media files has only one entry in my iTunes library. That is, for each song, compare the file location for all subsequent songs. If they match, add those songs (not the files, of which there is only one, but the pointers in the library) to a list - probably stored in another list - and remove them from the rest of this search. (Alternatively, create a set of buckets whose names are the filenames associated with the duplicates-by-songname. Traverse the list of such duplicates, tossing each into it’s bucket. Merge all the songs in each bucket.)
In the merging process of #2, all metadata should be, in some sense, preserved, except where it is explicitly and purposefully discarded. This means that there should be a set of options for each metadata key. All metadata should have the following options: require that the data values be identical (in which case it is a search criterion or a filter on the search results); “accumulate” them in some way; “preserve the larger of the two” in some sense; “preserve the smaller of the two” in some sense; reset the metadata to the iTunes default; check CDDB; or preserve the one connected with metadata that is in some other way “preferred” (where preference is defined by a criterion on some other metatada, such as “Date Added”, “File Type”, “play count”, or “sound check volume adjustment”). When accumulating strings, the user should be given the option to specify another character or string to insert between the joined strings.
The UI for these options could be as simple as a list of metadata categories, with a check-box ([match/equal]), a set of radio buttons ([combine/add] [smaller] [larger] [reset] [downarrow] [leftarrow]), a number box (”priority”), and a text box (”separator”) beside each one. The check-box would determine whether the metadata category would serve as a filter or search criterion. The radio buttons would select among the options described above. The contents of the text box would be appended to the first n-1 of n duplicates before accumulating them, if they are to be accumulated. If the number box is not empty, it’s contents would be used to order the priority of the metadata when determining which of two or more duplicate entries would be “preferred” for purposes of the last radio button.
I’ve looked at a lot of programs that claim to fix the iTunes music library, and they may all work just fine, but none of them seem to be trying to fix the problem I have with my library. Is there anything out there that will do this? If not, does someone want a contract to do it for me?