I'm new to the Piano Society, and I love the recordings. However, there is a troublesome issue that I'd like to bring up: I import these recordings using Itunes and subsequently listen to them on my Ipod, but the file information on many of the recordings does not import properly. Most show up on Itunes as "unknown album" and without track numbers. Worst of all, the composer's name appears in the name of the piece, whilst the "composer" field imports as a blank. For almost all other cases, such as tracks imported to Itunes from audios CDs, one can easily edit the information to correct this when it happens, but the files I'm downloading from the Piano Society appear to be write-protected.
Why is this a problem? The best way to organize a large classical music collection in Itunes is by composer. With that field blank, music imported from the Piano Society becomes a "loose cannon" in the collection. For example, a playlist of everything I have by Bach will not include the Bach compositions that I have from the Piano Society.
Either I'm missing something simple, or else I just can't use the Piano society recordings because they are write-protected and don't import properly. Thanks in advance for any help with this issue!

Hi T.E.Lawrence,

I am not sure what this problem is - but I've never imported stuff in iTunes. Our recordings are certainly not write-protected.

We do use iTunes (or at least I do) to id3-tag the recordings that go on the site. All recordings should be tagged like shown in the attached image. There
could be some older recordings that deviate, but the vast majority will look like this (except for the comment 'Piano' which I use privately on my recordings). If you think the tagging should be different to make this work correctly, I'd like to know. Or you tell me how to import recordings in iTunes like you do, and I will look into it.

Cheers

Chris

Aha! That makes things a lot clearer, Chris. I downloaded your excellent Die Kunst Der Fuge recordings and every one is just as you say - no Itunes problems at all. The files that I have problems with are listed in the second attachment. Probably older ones as you mentioned. An example of the Id3 Itunes screen is shown for one of them in the first attachment. Note that everything is greyed out, meaning no editing is allowed.

Thanks,

(real name is Gary; TEL is one of my heroes)

Interesting. It's clear that we need to ensure correct ID3 tagging. problem is that it's a manual process and mistakes are sometimes made - especially ion the past There being different versions of tags, and iTunes' switch to Unicode tags at some stage does not help. Another problem is that there are only old versions of the ID3LIB library I use on the Linux server.

I dot not understand why that particular recording appears grayed out for you. It does not for me when I download it.
Also I don't understand why in your left column (which I assume to be 'Album') it sometimes shows the artist name, sometimes Unknown album, and
sometimes the correct value http://pianosociety.com. What version is your iTunes ?

I'll see what I can do with the tagging software on the server to put this right as much as possible.

I'm using Itunes 10.5 on a Windows 7 machine, Chris. Your Bach recordings that I downloaded sometimes display just http://pianosociety.com, and sometimes also show your name in the "Album by Artist" field and attempt to show album art, which of course reverts to the Itunes logo in this case. These differences are strange, but they do not cause any problems listening to the recordings with Itunes.

Thanks again for your help.

Ok, I'll generate a list of all ID3 tags when I find some time, and hope it is not too much to fix (I don't fancy downloading, re-tagging, and uploading hunderds of files).
I see you also mentioned missing Track numbers in your OP. Be aware that we have never used that particular field, and never will.

Done some digging. Of the 5231 mp3 files we have, 5005 have MPEG1 tags. Five have MPEG2.5 tags, 104 have MPEG2 tags, and 117 have no tags.
I am pretty sure the tagging will be wrong, or inconsistent, for many older files. It will be a bastard to put all this right, and even then I'm not sure it will
solve the problem of files appearing 'write-protected' i.e. not being able to change the tags. Different iTunes version may further cloud the issue. You may
want to check however if somehow the files you downloaded HAVE been marked read-only by your OS. Just go to Explorer, do Properties and click the Security tab.

Seems like you may have opened a veritable can of worms.....

In fact, that was apparently the source of the problem, although not all files I download from the Piano Society suffer this fate, maybe just the older ones. In any case it's easy enough to fix, and I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier:

In iTunes, right click on the file in question and select "Show in Windows Explorer." In Explorer, right-click on the file again and select "Properties." The "general" tab automatically comes up, and at the bottom of this is a box marked "Read-only." If that box is checked, uncheck it and click "Apply," then "OK."

This makes the previously-uneditable file information now editable in iTunes. By clicking in the "Composer" field you can now type in the name of the composer, problem solved. You can also correct the anomalies in the "Album by Artist" field, mentioned in an earlier post, if that is worrisome to you.

Chris, since I'm apparently the only user who is concerned about this problem, I see no need for you or anyone to worry with fixing the ID tags of the older files. The solution to the problem is for the user to edit the info him/herself, as described here and in the previous posts in this thread. Thanks again for your help with this, and for the outstanding quality of yours and the other artists work available here!

-Gary

Hehe, it takes a great mind to think of the bleeding obvious
Seems like your system somehow believes (or believed at some stage) that downloaded files should be made read-only. Can't think why that would be.
There is nothing in the files that stipulates that, and anyway a HTML download would not care about a file's original permission bits on the server,
as long as it could read it. A strange thing it is.


That's true, but things like this irritate me. Everything on PS should be consistent. Heck, everything in the world should be consistent.
Then again, it's work, and I don't like work. So maybe I will just leave it and accept the universe is not perfect.


Why, thanks for that !