In January, my former band The Yars released their first full album (they were all shorts or live while I was there). I’ve had a copy of it since then, but haven’t imported it. I had heard the songs tons of times as Dwight was working on them, so was certainly burned out on them. I also don’t entirely like the sound direction the songs have taken, and it’s a little weird listening to another drummer play them. And it wasn’t in the iTunes store, so they had no CDDB data. I wanted to wait for that. So I never got around to importing it.
Today I decided to. It’s been in the iTunes store and other venues for months now. But still, there was no CDDB in the Gracenote database that iTunes uses. I could go to the store and see all the track info, but there was no way to get it to the album. But I found this article describing how you can copy store songs to a playlist, then use one of Doug’s scripts to copy them to another set of songs. So I went to the iTunes store to copy them to a playlist. Unfortunately, the new fancy iTunes song playlist doesn’t allow this to happen. The songs are like HTML elements on a page. And I had planned to boycott getting new versions of iTunes because they had cut off support for third party access. But just recently I think the very features that were now causing me trouble, plus the full new version number, had enticed me. I found the “Column Browser”, which does have a Cocoa style list of the songs, but I searched every possible genre with no luck at finding the Yars.
After much mucking with this, I remembered I had iTunes 7 still installed on another partition. I rebooted into that system and fired up iTunes. It spun the disk and of course said there was no CDDB info. I went to the store. I waited for the store to load. It never did. I logged in to my account, and waited again. It logged me in, but still didn’t load the store. I looked through several modifications of Google searches to see if I could find something saying that iTunes 7 no longer works with the store or something like that, but found nothing.
When I went to my music library (empty), an advert told me to get iTunes 8. So I clicked the link, went to the Apple website, found the little link that mentions G3 owners, found the place to download iTunes 8.2.x, downloaded about 90 MB, and installed. On opening, the store finally worked. I got the script, made the playlist, copied the track info, and then submitted the track info to the Gracenote CDDB. I couldn’t import these songs to my library, since that iTunes is not attached to it.
So I restarted into my normal OS, and opened iTunes. Let the disk spin. Again got the message, no info for the album in the CDDB. So I am of course sufficiently unhappy with the hour I spent trying to get the actual tags from the iTunes store. And of course writing this post only adds to the time I’ve spent on this. I’m not going to import the album at this point, and I’m not sure how to handle the issue. I could go back into the old OS with iTunes 8, import the music there, then move the songs to the other disk, restart and import them into my normal iTunes library. Or I could manually enter the information. Either way, I won’t be happy. Bullocks.
[Update 11/07] I finally decided to try again. The CDDB info was there this time. Perhaps there was just a delay with it propagating or something. The info seems to be correct. Happy that wasn’t an issue like it had been the one day. Now the only issue seems to be that the disc is having trouble being read. I think I’ll let Dwight know, see what he says. Perhaps he’ll be offended that it took this long to do anything with the disc.[/update]