iPod Safely re-import at higher quality without losing track/album data?

[MatchFrame]

I believe I want to re-import my entire library as Apple Lossless, but I want to make sure that I won't lose album art, track info, tags, etc?

I spent an absurd amount of time organizing and completing all the data in the library. If I re-import, will it save all this data or will I lose some or all of it?

 

[Cynicalone]

Sadly you will lose some track info,play counts etc. Since I assume you did change a few track names after importing? iTunes won't know what tracks to replace and will only replace the matching track's. You'll end up with some duplicates to clean out.

When I redid my library I went one disk at a time and cleaned up any mistakes as I went. It took some time but now all my CD's are reimported in lossless quality.

 

[MatchFrame]

Sadly you will lose some track info,play counts etc. Since I assume you did change a few track names after importing? iTunes won't know what tracks to replace and will only replace the matching track's. You'll end up with some duplicates to clean out.

When I redid my library I went one disk at a time and cleaned up any mistakes as I went. It took some time but now all my CD's are reimported in lossless quality.

The killer for me would be losing the album art. I'll probably try it with a few albums, and see what the hassle will be.

I think you have the right idea. Do it slowly over time and fix as you go. That's probably what I'll end up doing. Thanks!

 

[ReggaeFire]

I'm doing the same thing, what you need to do is make sure certain fields are the same before you re-import the CD, which will then prompt iTunes to ask if you want to replace an item which already exists. The key metadata points for this this seem to be track name, album name, track number, disc number. When you choose to replace it will embed all the metadata that exists in the track you are replacing. I run a script from Doug's itunes script site called "Copy Tag info Tracks to Tracks" and select everything in my AAC file, and copy it to the CD before I import (obviously it won't copy all the ID3 tags to the CD, but this ensures that the needed info corresponds). That being said, I still have on occasion the need to fix track numbers before the import. If you don't get the replace warning, then it's not going to copy over your existing data, instead just make a another copy of the same song in your iTunes.

 

[MatchFrame]

I'm doing the same thing, what you need to do is make sure certain fields are the same before you re-import the CD, which will then prompt iTunes to ask if you want to replace an item which already exists. The key metadata points for this this seem to be track name, album name, track number, disc number. When you choose to replace it will embed all the metadata that exists in the track you are replacing. I run a script from Doug's itunes script site called "Copy Tag info Tracks to Tracks" and select everything in my AAC file, and copy it to the CD before I import (obviously it won't copy all the ID3 tags to the CD, but this ensures that the needed info corresponds). That being said, I still have on occasion the need to fix track numbers before the import. If you don't get the replace warning, then it's not going to copy over your existing data, instead just make a another copy of the same song in your iTunes.

Thank you! That is exactly the info I needed to prepare for this process. I'm hoping it goes pretty easy.