Everything iTunes

Let’s face it: Almost nobody bought all their music in the iTunes Store. Whether it’s imported from CDs or bought in another online music store – the non-iTMS-tracks always look a bit different in iTunes: There are no advisory tags and there’s no copyright notice in the “Get Info” window. While the latter isn’t really important to most people advisory tags mixed with non-tagged Tracks might bother the neatly iTunes user.

Most people solve it by hiding advisory tags all together (Preferences -> Uncheck “Show content rating in library”), but there’s another solution: Meta-Data-Editor atomicparsley (Command line only!) makes it possible to save the rating inside your files just like apple does it. The catch in this case would be that all your music has to be in the new MPEG4-format (ACC/m4a), but if you are an iPod User this shouldn’t make a big difference for you anyway (in fact the new format has various advantages over mp3).

Now let’s get to business: If you want to tag your files correctly you need to download atomicparsley and also you might want to use my scripts so you don’t have to type in stuff on the command line yourself. There is one for tagging as “explicit” and one to tag as “clean“. To get the thing working you have to put the atomicpasley.exe-file in the same folder as the scripts or in your windows-directory. If you are ready to go you just need to select the tracks you want to tag in iTunes and run one of the scripts. There will flash a couple of black command-windows and once they are gone everything is set. But first you need to force iTunes to reread the track-tags. To do so just open the “Get Info” window of each track (or open for the first track in an album and press “Next” until you reach the last track) and once you close it iTunes should show you your newly tagged files. Congratulations to a more iTMS-compatible library.