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Topic: What are my options for migrating my iTunes data into FB2K? (Read 3409 times) previous topic - next topic
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What are my options for migrating my iTunes data into FB2K?

I searched for a bit but I couldn't find any solid answers and am beginning to despair. I have years of iTunes metadata that I don't want to part with. In particular, ratings, playcounts, date added, and date played. What options do I have for getting this information into an FB2K library?

What are my options for migrating my iTunes data into FB2K?

Reply #1 –
Quote from: phopu on
I searched for a bit but I couldn't find any solid answers and am beginning to despair. I have years of iTunes metadata that I don't want to part with. In particular, ratings, playcounts, date added, and date played. What options do I have for getting this information into an FB2K library?

I've only been looking a couple hours, but it looks like in the short term using some other tool or being patient and waiting for more progress and some issues minor and major to be sorted out.

Since I don't know much maybe somebody will post a better answer.

What are my options for migrating my iTunes data into FB2K?

Reply #2 –
Thanks for the reply Mike! Here's what I know so far...

Where the iTunes data is located:
1) The information I'm looking to keep is stored in either an iTunes proprietary binary file called iTunes Library.itl and a plain text file called iTunes Music Library.xml that gets outputted at the same time.
2) Alternatively, I can just open iTunes, set the columns to display the information I want to keep, and copy & paste the data into a spreadsheet program. Gives me more flexibility in terms of possibly creating an import file into FB2K.

How to get data into FB2K:
This is where I have the least information. I've fiddled with a basic install of FB2K and its playcount component. The import file seems to use a strange kind of mapping so that for example, instead of a filename, you'd see a series of letters and numbers. The time also is stored not as a human readable date, but as a single number.

So long story short I need to figure out 2 things:
1) How to link the import code with the actual file.
2) How to convert a date to a single number.
 

What are my options for migrating my iTunes data into FB2K?

Reply #4 –
@romor -- you can import statistics from file tags, and foobar2000 does cater for mass tagging very well, so it's very do-able (as per link below).

@ phopu -- Have a look at this post and the subsequent posts (post #204 to #212)
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=737850

GBNeil managed to get his stats into foobar2000 from iTunes with a little help from his friends 
Everything you need should be in those posts.

-----

EDIT:

To calculate the dates in Excel:

1) Number of days from January 1st 1601 to December 31st 1999 = 145,730  (constant)
2) Number of days from 1st January 2000 to "the date you have for %added%" (e.g. 1st October 2010):  3,926  (variable)
3) Add (1) and (2) together gives you the number of days from January 1st 1601 to your date: 145,730 + 3,926 = 149,656

(The reason you do this in 2 parts AFAIR is due to Excel getting confused (#VALUE!) by calculating the number of days by doing 1/10/2010 minus 1/1/1601.)

Now we work out how many "100-nanosecond intervals" there are in a day -- quick answer =  864,000,000,000
4) We multiply  864,000,000,000 by 149,656 = 129302784000000000

i.e. a 64-bit value that represents the number of 100-nanosecond intervals that have elapsed since 12:00 A.M. January 1, 1601 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)

And that is the %added% date in foobar2000's date format.

C.

EDIT2: Numerical typo on (3) amended
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

What are my options for migrating my iTunes data into FB2K?

Reply #5 –
OK, never thought on masstagging stats to files
It is surely better then nothing

What are my options for migrating my iTunes data into FB2K?

Reply #6 –
romor, yeah I did it from foo_custominfo (SQL) to foo_playcount and that was probably more of a pain (since I needed an old foobar2000 with cwb_hooks to get the system time data).

Once you get the data into Excel it's actually not that big a deal -- you just need to be methodical and make sure you create a field like %path_check% so you can do a random spot check of files to see if they've got the correct data.

C.

EDIT: Added link
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

What are my options for migrating my iTunes data into FB2K?

Reply #7 –
Thanks guys for the replies!

I managed to get my data into foobar some other way. Didn't involve adding any tags to the file itself neither. What I did basically was the following:

1) From my fresh Foobar 2000 installation, I exported all the play statistics.
2) Opening the export file in excel, I changed the playcount totals so that each row would count up starting from 1.
3) I imported this new data into FB2k.
4) After sorting by playcount, I exported my library as an M3U playlist.

The m3u file is a plain text document that has the file location for all the music in my library in the order they appeared in my export/import file. So now that I know the file location and its corresponding code, creating a real import file from my actual iTunes data (using what I learnt from carpman about the dates of course  )was a trivial detail. Hope this helps someone!

What are my options for migrating my iTunes data into FB2K?

Reply #8 –
Quote from: phopu on
Thanks guys for the replies!

I managed to get my data into foobar some other way. Didn't involve adding any tags to the file itself neither. What I did basically was the following:

1) From my fresh Foobar 2000 installation, I exported all the play statistics.
2) Opening the export file in excel, I changed the playcount totals so that each row would count up starting from 1.
3) I imported this new data into FB2k.
4) After sorting by playcount, I exported my library as an M3U playlist.

The m3u file is a plain text document that has the file location for all the music in my library in the order they appeared in my export/import file. So now that I know the file location and its corresponding code, creating a real import file from my actual iTunes data (using what I learnt from carpman about the dates of course  )was a trivial detail. Hope this helps someone!



Hi phopu

I am really struggling to figure out the migration. seems you figured it all out. Im still not able to comprehend what you did.... might it be possible for me to email you my XML file to manipulate as necessary? The more i read on the subject the less it all makes sense.... And I generally think Im pretty good.... Just no super-nerd as it seems I need to be?