Fix your MP3 files for iTunes, iPod, iPhone and get album art
Date: Friday, April 18, 2008 @ 10:00:32 UTC
Topic: Neater than RAZR phones


What do you do if you have a bunch of songs ripped from various sources, and you load them into your iPod or iPhone and now the nifty sorting and album art features are not working? The key is to tag your song files properly. Each song file actually has some text information (an ID3 tag) stored inside the file that tells iTunes what the artist, song title, album name, genre and year are.




FixTunes is a helpful application that looks up tag information assigns album art to your songs in preparation for loading into iTunes. One problem with FixTunes is that is cannot correctly identify songs if there is incorrect current ID3 tag information. Many times filenames do not agree with the tag information. For example, you might have a file named "George Benson – Boardwalk.mp3", but the ID3 tag might have "The Drifters" in the artist tag. The only way you would know which is correct is to listen to the songs and correctly identify the artist. This is a problem with home ripped mp3 files. Mp3 ripping has been occurring for many years, and many older files only have the file name to identify the song. Songs purchased through iTunes do not have this problem.

You can keep re-using the free demo version of FixTunes for more than 50 songs. The trick is that you only can do 50 songs at a time. For those who do not have $29.95, but all the time in the world, here is a useful trick. This is mainly to appeal to the poor soul on the FixTunes message board who said “I am a poor college student, how do I get a crack for this program?”

Install the FixTunes program. Go to the directory C:Program FilesCloudbrainFixTunes or the virtual store directory if you have Windows Vista. The virtual store lives in your Users directory in AppDataVirtualStoreProgram FilesCloudbrainFixTunes directory. Make a copy of the settings.dat file (Copy of settings.dat) before you run FixTunes for the first time.

Now run FixTunes fix 50 or so files. Once you reach the limit, exit FixTunes. Now delete the settings.dat file and the data directory. Copy your saved copy of the settings.data to settings.dat. Now start FixTunes and run 50 more. The is the only way to break the FixTunes fifty song limit.

www.fixtunes.com







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