CDpedia does not find iTunes tracks but can play them

[Waldbaer]

Hi Bruji,
I have some albums that contain tracks that CDpedia does not mark as "in iTunes" (note symbol), but they are there, actually even the "play" button in CDpedia works for them.

The menu command "update iTunes status" never has had any results by the way (as far as I can see). Is there any other possibility to force-update the iTunes titles, preferably only for the currently selected albums (it takes some time to check all my library). What data is this track-availability-check based on, by the way? Especially, if I change a name in iTunes (usually because CDpedia's list is right but iTunes' has a typo), CDpedia does not find it by itself, if it did not find it before, so I'd like to tell him "hey look again, it's really the same now".

Another interesting thing I found out concerning this topic: Some of these not recognized titles show up later after a seemingly random amount of time when I recheck the album's Edit.../Tracks window. Maybe it just helps to keep CDpedia opened in the background a while? Anyways, I'd prefer to be able to get everything clean as I'm working with it.

Any ideas what could be the problem? Thanks for your help!
Waldbaer

[Conor]

Hi Waldbaer,

You have described very closely how the feature works internally. Because iTunes does not have the ability to report only changed files, CDpedia is left looking at the entire database for changes. Hence why this is done in the background on a weekly basis. CDpedia waits until you will not notice a little CPU work in the background and updates all the information from iTunes then. Also recent version of iTunes have decided not to update the database right away and hence iTunes changes don't reflect immediately as iTunes does not save the change to iTunes Music Libray.xml file until a later point.

Since you mention that that the "Refresh iTunes Tracks" is not updating the results, then it's something else as that command should sync everything to match iTunes, unless the change has been done in iTunes in the last about 15 minutes and iTunes has yet to save the change as mentioned above.

The Apple Script speed in iTunes has improved in the last few years and I do have it on my to do list to look at a more real time solution using Apple Script that reflects the changes immediately without having to use the "View -> Refresh iTunes Tracks". I have implemented part of that solution already in that it should get updates for the currently edited Album directly from iTunes. Please try out the CDpedia beta version, in it after changing a name in iTunes and then opening the album for edit in CDpedia should update the status of the notes in the tracks view to reflect the latest changes. It should also be a bit more forgiving and match even though iTunes might have an extra space for example.

[Waldbaer]

Hi Conor,
the beta now understands if changes in iTunes have recently taken place, that's great!

I experimented a little more with it. May it be that the "play" button does have other criteria than the iTunes status? That would explain why it works on tracks that are not even admitted to exist in iTunes. It seems that the status function needs the same artist, too, but the play button does not. Maybe it would be logical to sync their criteria, if possible.

I've found another funny thing. In the following screenshot I just hit the play button of track 14 and it's playing track 13 instead. Of course track 14 is in iTunes, too, exactly same name (c&p), but not found. Playing Track 13 works correctly, btw.


That might be special, but maybe you find a nice workaround for that, too. Thank you for your nearly immediate changes to the app once again and making the pedias better every day!

[Conor]

Thank you for testing the change.

The reason the play button works on tracks not marked is that it's more accommodating than the note icon. The note icon requires an exact match on both title and artist (exempting capitalization and diacritics). The play button on the other hand is willing to work only with title and a partial title at that. When you click on play on a track that does not have a note, it will send the partial information to iTunes and ask it to play something as close to this search as possible. In the hopes that the user get some music to listen to. This would be why iTunes is picking up the first version of that track name, since there is a match to the track name. Please try the beta again with the same song, it should now go through and keep matching items for a perfect match, instead of letting iTunes do it.

I like to stay strict on the matching as it keeps CDpedia more useful for clean up and organizing your music against iTunes. Part of the to do list is to improve the data stored by CDpedia to also include the unique IDs of the tracks in iTunes for perfect matches. However that is a whole different workflow internally and will not happen until a 6.0 version, as it requires not only serious work, but serious testing.

[Waldbaer]

Hi Conor,
sorry for the late answer; I did not get another notification email and thought you would not have answered again (yet). I tested the new beta and now it plays the correct version. It's still not found though (note symbol), as far as I've tried. Maybe you can get this to work, too.

Another thing I just had a little trouble with: Apostrophes are sometimes different characters, on US keyboards there is one directly and one opt+]. The last one may not be used correctly as an apostrophe but, well, I would not care if somebody feeding the database of CDpedia prefers it, so I'd suggest to build in a little tolerance for that, since it's really annoying to fix manually on several songs just to have the note symbol correct.

[Conor]

Thank you. I'll look at the apostrophe issue. Original I was going to remove all punctuation for matching, but did not want to go that route as there might be edge cases where that causes incorrect matches.

[Waldbaer]

I've had another unexpected incorrect matching:

Playing "You" from CDpedia plays "Wherever You Go" by the way... I'm looking forward to the UID-Match.

[Conor]

Thanks for the screenshots, helps get a lot of detail out of them.