Going from Zune to Ipod has been a disaster...help?

[SKoprowski]

I recently got an Ipod Touch after having Zune players since their debut. I mainly gave in because I wanted a device I can check the internet, email and also listen to music. Plus I anticipate getting a new car soon and it would be nice to just connect the Ipod to a car stereo and have access to all the music using the car stereo's interface. Seems like everyone supports the Ipod for this. Anyway, I have all my music (which is WMA) organized in a Zune music folder- all by artist and album. In the Zune software everything is perfectly organized- no straggling songs or artists. For example- if I click on Timberland his albums show up and then all the songs on the album show up- regardless of how many artists were involved in his songs. Likewise when I click on to just view albums- Zune just shows the album cover- only once- not 15 time because Timberland wrote songs with different artists. I installed Itunes, set to import music as 128K ACC and checked Itunes to organize the music folder by artist and album (which maybe was my mistake). I dragged the zune music folder to import into Itunes and it took my computer about a day to convert 10,000 songs. Worked great so far. I assumed my Itunes library would look as organized as my Zune library appeared.

However, Itunes found maybe less then half of the album covers ( even after scanning for them a few times) and the music is all over the place. A lot of songs don't even show up under one artist or a single album. If I tell Itunes to just show albums- I get 8 Timberland Album covers for separate songs that are supposed to be under one album. And this happens for a lot of my music. In other words I find Itunes music organization to suck. Is there a different way I should do things to make this more organized in Itunes. Is there a third party software that would go through my music and correct tags so Itunes is more organized? Thanks.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

You need a WMA to MP3 converter that preserves ID tags. There are a few options out there to be googled up. No biggie. Convert your WMAs first, then import into iTunes.

:shrug:

 

[SKoprowski]

I had Itunes convert my wma files to aac. So I was wrong to assume Itunes maintains the tag info? I don't see how I can be faulted for that. :shrug:

 

[TheStu]

I had Itunes convert my wma files to aac. So I was wrong to assume Itunes maintains the tag info? I don't see how I can be faulted for that. :shrug:

I think it has to do with the fact that at least one of those two, either Zune or iTunes doesn't properly handle the tags, it actually might be both.

I know that iTunes does its own thing a little bit in some places, and I also am about 99% certain that the Zune software does not store the album art in the actual file.

You can still have iTunes handle the conversion, and you can use AAC or MP3, whatever. Telling iTunes to not manage the folders and files will only affect the Explorer aspect of the files, where they are kept, but it won't change how they are organized in the Library itself.

 

[alent1234]

Use bing to find album art then copy and paste it into iTunes. Vry easy

 

[TheStu]

Use bing to find album art then copy and paste it into iTunes. Vry easy

Yea, or just go into the folders where the Zune software stored the music, the album art is there.

 

[Kev]

I was in the same boat as you. I think I used Media Monkey or winamp to convert all my wma music to mp3. I didn't have much album info but I think it converted most correctly. Not sure why you want to convert to aac, mp3 works fine

 

[TheStu]

I was in the same boat as you. I think I used Media Monkey or winamp to convert all my wma music to mp3. I didn't have much album info but I think it converted most correctly. Not sure why you want to convert to aac, mp3 works fine

IIRC iTunes defaults to AAC, and it isn't immediately obvious to switch it to MP3.

Also, my understanding is that a 128Kb AAC will be higher quality than a 128Kb MP3 due to the differences in compression.

But your point is valid otherwise, MP3 is more universally accepted.

 

[Ka0t1x]

One thing that I had to do one weekend was sit down and get all of my music collection in order. I switched from Windows/Winamp to OSX/iTunes [no ipod] a few years back.

I think the problem is that Windows doesn't manage the tags correctly, whereas an ID3 tag is your best bet with iTunes. I had similar issues with different album covers, and you really need to edit them all and make them the same. Album Artist, Artist, Album Name. Sometimes parenthesis, etc makes a crappy result.

 

[SKoprowski]

I used AAC because like the previous poster said, it is generally better quality then mp3 at 128k. I spent some time with media monkey last night and retagged a lot of my music. I do wonder I just reconverted WMA to MP3 through media monkey instead of Itunes it may be faster. I have 11,000 192Kb WMA files I used with my Zune, all perfectly organized in the Zune software. I just assumed Itunes would just convert my wma files and it would show up the same as it did with the Zune software. I did use the album art file from the Zune folders in Itunes but they are lower quality and don't look so hot on the Ipod's screen. Not really happy about all of this.