different [wrong] information for same album

[adaman]

thanks leon for your responses to my two previous posts...

i have one more question:

albums that i have imported into itunes from cd, as well as downloaded music from the same album are changed when i run mpfreaker...

i tried un-selecting deep search, and it helped a bit...but for example...i have the beatles white album...i imported this into i-tunes from my cd...i ran the songs through mpfreaker because i wanted to update artwork and genre...i was doing this with a batch of other songs, so i had more than genre and artwork selected [everything except song title was checked]...some of the songs on the white album stayed correct, some were changed to random album names...such as: "The BEATLES (Whute Album)"...some were "White Album (disc 1)" and others stayed correct: "The White Album"...

i bought the full version of freaker so that i could updated and correct my entire library before moving it onto my ipod...i just started going letter by letter, and i am hesitant to continue, because it seems to be making the problem worse and leaving my music less organized...two questions...:

is there anyway to fix the songs that mpfreaker already corrected an over-wrote tags for??

and, how can i get accurate results??

when i tested the program it was accurate on the small sets of three songs, but the point was to batch process large groups of songs to save me some time...i am spending even more time now going back through and fixing mistakes...


thanks for any help you can provide

[beastie]

albums that i have imported into itunes from cd, as well as downloaded music from the same album are changed when i run mpfreaker...

It's hard to say exactly what is going on in your case, but I can speculate on possible causes. I should emphasize that MPFreaker won't ever change information that you already have, unless you've specifically told it to Overwrite that type of information.

If you have an album full of songs in your music library for which you either 1) don't already have album names or 2) you've told MPFreaker to overwrite them, MPFreaker may end up assigning different album names to some of these tracks than what you want:

A. Because of spelling differences in track names, MPFreaker may rely upon a different online database for a track than it did for previous tracks, with a different resulting album name.

B. MPFreaker may find that a particular song appears to have been released earlier on another album entirely (assuming you've left Album set to "Oldest", the default).

is there anyway to fix the songs that mpfreaker already corrected an over-wrote tags for??

If you have a wodge of songs that you know are the same artist/album, there's simply no better way to start than to quickly select all of those songs in iTunes and set them to the right artist and album names in the Get Info window. It's one quick action applied to every song on that album. Of course, if you're going from a ripped CD, you'll already have nice consistent artist & album names on your tracks, and you shouldn't be telling MPFreaker to overwrite any of that info.

and, how can i get accurate results??

A. Try and make sure that the information you start with is spelled correctly.

B. Don't use Deep Search all the time. It's most useful when returning to tracks which ended up as "Greatest Hits" or a much more modern release year than you know it should be, in which case you would turn on Deep Search, Album Overwrite, Track Overwrite, and Year Overwrite, then re-scan them.

C. Don't overwrite more than necessary. As a disillusioned user once pointed out, MPFreaker isn't a magic wand. Your existing information is possibly more accurate than what MPFreaker would find.

D. Work with your entire library instead of bits and pieces in a playlist. MPFreaker will copy genre, year, and artwork from existing stuff it knows about if the artist and album name are the same, thereby ensuring consistency.

Leon