Macs make a lot more sense when you think of them as designed to be stand-alone. OS X can do networking, but it doesn’t really get it. That’s partly because of the UNIX everything-is-a-file philosophy: Unix doesn’t see networks, it only sees external drives. Windows sees networks and drives on the networks, which sounds as if it should be the same, but really is not.
Windows exposes the filesystem to the user in its programmes, and asks the user to make the filesystem their friend. In Windows you open a file by navigating through the filesystem in the File Open dialog or by clicking on a name in the Recently Used Files list. The only time you see icons representing your files in Windows is a) when you’re looking at the directory in Explorer, or b) when you’re using a programme that’s modelled on something from OSX, such as Calibre or most music management programs.
By design, OS X hides all the nasty OS stuff - such as the filesystem - from the user. This is usually done by adding an intermediate layer between the user interface and the filesystem. In an OS X programme the user sees a friendly icon and clicks on that: the programme looks at a database file - usually in XML format - that tells it where the file is stored. This works wonderfully until the user does something with their music files directly via the filesystem, say, with Finder and then everything goes to pieces. Because the database behind the cool interface has not been updated and indeed can’t be updated with changes made directly via Finder or with Unix commands on the Terminal.
OS X wants you to deal with your music collection ONLY through iTunes or a similar programme. That is the only way the database is kept up to date. It’s also the only way that the very quirky file permissions that iTunes uses get handled correctly. It’s possible to alter the file and directory permissions to 777 (all access to everyone) in Terminal but not have that show up in Finder, or have iTunes behave as if the files and directory have permission 777. (Oh yes, I have done this.)
(Windows programs assume that you’re going to do all sorts of things, so they have a ‘Watch this directory’ function that scans and updates the cool interface when you start the program. That can be kinda annoying at times. But it’s swapping one annoyance for another.)
Suppose you copied Volunteers by the Jefferson Airplane from your Macbook iTunes directory to a backup directory on your NAS. When you later build an iTunes library from this NAS directory, it will add the Volunteers album and files it finds, but you won’t be able to modify the album info, and the artwork will get lost. What’s happened is that the file and directory permissions have become mis-aligned - not in Terminal world, but in the parallel universe of iTunes / Finder permissions.
So how do you get the artwork back, and become able to change the album info?
Here’s the fix that occurred to me…
1. Create a directory in the Music section on the computer that has the iTunes you are using. This will typically be the SDD of your Mac Book / Air / Pro. I called mine Temp. It doesn’t matter.
2. Copy the files from Volunteers (or whatever) into this Temp directory.
3. Use iTunes to delete the original Songs and the Files.
4. Check that the directory for Volunteers (or whatever) is also deleted, as it might not be if it has artwork files or other stuff in it
5. in iTunes, do File -> Add to Library and choose Temp. iTunes will now do its stuff.
6. Now you can add the album artwork and make whatever other changes you want, and it will stick.
7. Delete the files in Temp.
8. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
9. Works On My Machine and NAS. YMMV.
It sounds clunky, but it soon become muscle memory. Do it as a background job when you’re writing blog entries or something, and you’ll be all caught up before you know it.
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