Apple dependancy on iTunes

One thing that is very clear is the inherent behaviour and dependancy of Apple iOS products on iTunes.

This has led to myself wondering how many iPod & iPad users need Microsoft in there life / a dependancy (excluding the pure Apple eco-system users with a MAC) ?!?

Also the transfer of applications within the Apple eco-system that rely on iTunes to perform the transfer role.

Im my opinion this is not a very good strategy in this era where people want to move to thin clients, tablets and smart phones as personal and/or business tools.

L

How to make songs part of one album in iTunes

To have this showing correctly in the albums do the following from iTunes:Select all the files that is part of the album, Right click, get info, select this album is part of a compilation.Right click on the selection again, get info, add "Various Artists" to the Album Artist.This will fix your library. As an alternative this can be done via an mp3 tagging by setting the following extended tag information

ALBUMARTIST "Various Artists" COMPILATION "1"

In ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 COMPILATION set the TCMP Field.

The eyeD3 CLI application can be used to confirm this as well

eyeD3 -v [name].mp3

Or else Puddletag aplication with a custome column added 

Title : Compilation
Field: itunescompilationflag

or edit > extended tags

iTunes MAC & iTunes PC not equal to iTunes iPad

So the wonderfull world of "comliant to this & that" on the spec sheet vs. reality set in again. Now this might be down to lack of product knowledge as well but so you learn.

From the little Apple experience I gained so far I could really say in a "pure" Apple eco-system everything works brilliant and as planned, but trying to add 3rd party or other service to this ecosystem seem to be problematic.

iTunes for PC & MAC have a feature for "Shared" resources



 

whereas iPad/iPhone itunes does not let you choose your itunes library. You always need to connect to your Mac/PC (remote) itunes and sync with your ipad.

So the feature called iTunes Server does not mean you can assume it can stream to all Apple type devices.

So in my instance where I enabled the iTunes server on a QNAP NAS the Workaround:

Use the QMobile application provided by QNAP to remotely play the music library on the iPad.

QNAP iTunes Server dying

Testing a few mp3's on the NAS to iTunes PC worked 100%, after transferring my complete collection the iTunes server kept on dying via the web interface. So it was back to the old trusted CLI via ssh and fault finding:

Firstly to check if the iTunes server process is running or not:

ps | grep mt-daapd

And to find the command options:

mt-daapd --help

To start the process manually:

mt-daapd -d 9 -c /etc/mt-daapd.conf -f 

with

-d 9 setting the debug level to 9

-c to use a spesific configuration file

-f to run it in teh foreground allowing you to see the debug messages in real time.

running this will halt on the reason for the iTunes server to fail.

if the error is with .m3u files

this can be fixed by changing a line the qnaps /etc/mt-daapd.conf

turing: process_m3u 1 => process_m3u 0

In my instance a single mp3 file caused the process to stop, I corrected the mp3 id tag 

Restarted the service and everything worked like a charm