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[chrtob]

Hi forum members,

JRiver is so well made as audio player that I would like to switch from iTunes as soon as possible. My audio library has grown over the years and contains arround 30'000 files. Taging them carefully for my somehow special needs involved several months of work over the years with plenty of manual interaction.

Importing my library in JRiver works well. But how can I transfer all the tags from iTunes? In detail: I do not know how to transfer a tag that is part of the video section in iTunes, in German called "Beschreibung", description. The image in the attachement shows how I use that tag to fill in the exact recording date plus the number of the wax master plus the number of the shellac.

Does anybody have an idea how I can transfere that tag to JRiver? I cannot imagine that I am the first user with that problem. Maybe the functionality is there allready and I just do not know how to handle it.

Doing that transfer of my audio libraray is the perfect moment to correct some things that turned out to be a mistake by the years. Is there a tool – it could be in iTunes allready, if that functionality does not exist in JRiver – that allows to switch the content of a specific tag (column) troughout the entire audio library to an other tag (column)?

My audio files are uncompressed aif files and I work with apple. I did the transfer to JRiver by importing the aif-files. I guess that is the only possible way. At least I did not find any way how I could import the xml file of iTunes that probally would contain all tags I use in iTunes.   

Regards – Christian Tobler

[MrC]

Quick response.

I don't know which tags iTunes makes available for export, so some may not come across (at least without extra work).  First try this:

Create new fields in MC with EXACTLY the same spelling / casing as the tags in your iTunes.  The best way to ensure the tag names match is in MC to examine the tag dump (will show physical tags and values).  Click the topmost line in the Tag Action Window; it shows the file type, size, etc.  It will open a new window showing physical tags.

Once you have these tag values, you can use Update Library (from tags) to re-read the tag values, filling in your new fields.

See how that works out.

[Maeghaus]

I hadn't thought of creating new fields. I'll have to test that.

There is an option that I used, based on a forum thread, which is to export your main Library as an XML Playlist, then import the file into Media Center. However, you will need to modify the XML file so that JRiver will be able to locate your files. Use the Find/Replace feature in the Mac program Dashcode (it comes with the OS; look under the root directory in Developers/Applications or search Spotlight for "Dashcode").

Open the XML file in Dashcode, and modify the directory location of each of your files.

**I would need to know if you have your music library on your main hard drive or on another drive (like an external drive) to tell you what to replace the directory info with.

TIP: Before trying this on the main library, try making a test Playlist (or export a present one) of around 20 songs. Export as XML and test it using the directory modification. Once your import into Media Center is successful, you'll be able to handle your main library and get it imported with info and artwork included (I noticed that I need to redirect the Comments, but that's another story).

EXAMPLE: In my case, as my Library is on an external drive, I replaced the directory header for each file. For example, the original directory header for iTunes was, on one song example:

<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/Volumes/Tom's%20Media%20Library/A-Ha/Hunting%20High%20and%20Low/01%20Take%20On%20Me.mp3</string>

I took out file://localhost and replaced it with, well, nothing. I told Find/Replace to replace it with a blank entry so that it would cut out file://localhost.

The end result was this:

<key>Location</key><string>/Volumes/Tom's%20Media%20Library/A-Ha/Hunting%20High%20and%20Low/01%20Take%20On%20Me.mp3</string>

I used Find/Replace to find and Replace All the entries in the XML file. With a large library, I don't know how long it takes to replace them all, but it should not take long. The procedure above does not affect your iTunes library as it is merely telling Media Center where the playable files are. Any questions you have I would be happy to answer them.

-- Tom

P.S. I also have a large library of about 28,000 songs but am still working on importing since I am not done editing in iTunes.

[Maeghaus]

This is the forum thread where I found out how to do the XML import: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=78589.0

-- Tom