iTunes Tests My Patience
We have long used iTunes to manage our main music library. It isn't what we use to manage the station playback, but iTunes does house and manage our 120,000 song library.
Last November Apple "upgraded" iTunes to version 11. Much teeth-gnashing amongst users was heard, followed by a mass migration away from iTunes. The new version didn't feel right, look right, or behave right, nor did it seem to handle large media libraries any better than version 10.
Worse still, it removed some basic functionality which had existed for many, many years.
For BAGeL Radio the big problem was the removal of the ability for one to open playlists (or anything) in separate windows, making the building of our massive playlists near impossible. As soon as we found a way to do so, we downgraded to iTunes 10.7 on the machines we use to manage the library.
This week I discovered that I blew up our main iTunes library a couple of weeks ago when I downgraded the version of iTunes on the broadcast machine. It didn't become apparent because, as I mentioned, BAGeL Radio is not run from iTunes, it is run from Megaseg, which (thank goodness) has not forgotten where all of the music added to the library since last November lives.
I've spent most of the past 18 hours trying to reconstruct the iTunes library using various sanctioned, unsanctioned, and home-brewed methods. It appears that the last one I tried (home-brewed, involved editing the iTunes Library.xml file) was working, but after two hours of "importing" and not seeing any results, I stopped the process. This left iTunes unaware of about 36,000 of the 120,000 tracks in the library, and none of the 10+ years worth of playlists.
After what felt like just the right amount of self-flagellation for having exhibited nearly enough but clearly not quite enough patience, I started that whole process over again.
If it works, there will be a new episode of 480 Minutes tomorrow.
If it does not work I may bike to and jump off of the tallest building in Queens.
Fingers crossed.