Troubles with Burned Playlists

[jjoan]

Today I burned a playlist on a CD via iTunes.

Previously, when I burned a CD, the track info & artist names would show up both on the desktop & in the iTunes window asking me if I'd like to import that CD. Now I get a dialog box that says "The song names for this CD could not be found online. Do you still want to import the songs?"

The playlist name and the track names show up when I insert the CD on the computer from which the CD was burned. Any other Mac in our house sees the CD as "Untitled CD", and the dreaded Track 01, Track 02, Track 03. This also happens when I burn a CD from any of our Macs then look at the CDs on any mac other than the one that burned it.

Am I making sense?

What is going on? Is this an UPGRADE? Perhaps to thwart sharing playlists?

I was on the phone with Apple tech support for one hour and 23 minutes, and they said they have to check into it further & will get back to me.


2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
OS 10.4.11
iTunes 7.7.1

[Mayo]

The easy answer is that the CD tracks are probably not available on the online database called Gracenote CDDB that iTunes uses to download track ID information.  Is it an unusual CD or one that was produced a by a little-known artist?  Then it probably hasn't had the track data submitted to the database. I have seen this once or twice while ripping 469 CDs. At least one of the CDs was purchased from a street musician in Amsterdam...

The Cool Thing is that you can perform a public service and submit the track names yourself using iTunes. It's a menu item under iTunes/Advanced. Enter the word "submit" in the iTunes Help field and you will find the simple instructions for how to do it.

Another possibility is that the database was down for some reason. During your 1+ hour tech support call did they happen to consider either possibility???

[jjoan]

One of the CDs I burned was from an album I purchased through the iTunes Store. I made several test CDs from other fairly mainstream albums I purchased from Amazon.com., and some from older CDs I purchased before the days of Amazon.com.

Some playlists I burned during my testing frenzy were ones I'd burned years ago and given to my daughters....the track names showed up on those old ones, not the ones I burned today.

When I "get info" for each song in the playlist, the album name, artist, track number, and artwork show up for all (well, most all) of the songs.

For a nice bonus, the guy on tech support had me DELETE my entire library, then log out and log in and then add my library back in, thus changing the date added for all the albums to today, instead of in the chronological order in which I added them. Plus it deleted all my carefully planned playlists. Plus wasted half my morning.

I have my library backed up on an external drive, I hope I can figure out how to use that as my library, won't that have my playlists intact? I guess I'm spoiled, I loved my old iTunes and this is very annoying.

[Xairbusdriver]

I get the same results, sometimes, even when I have selected "Include text to CD..." in iTunes prefs. It works fin on my computer but not on the one I use to create a tape from a CD.

[kimmer]

QUOTE

I have my library backed up on an external drive, I hope I can figure out how to use that as my library, won't that have my playlists intact? I guess I'm spoiled, I loved my old iTunes and this is very annoying.

JJoan, you can access that backed up library by holding down the option key when launching iTunes and then selecting it as your library. But you'll have to have the external running every time you want to use it. That's about the extent of my knowledge about iTunes and I'll wait and let others tell you how to move it all over and use it on a permanent basis.

Mayo, thanks for the info on Gracenote CDDB. I've always wondered what in the world that was. I find it frustrating when it has gone in and changed my personal info on a song, and I go change it back. I have some older songs on CD that aren't in that database and I didn't know I could submit the info -- and maybe the album cover?

[Mayo]

So much for the easy answer...  

You can also copy your backup music folder to your User music folder if that was the original location. Changing the location of the current iTunes library can also be done in iTunes Preferences/Advanced.

[Xairbusdriver]

I think I should have posted this info here...it may help some, even if not jjoan.

<MacFixIt article>