I only use itunes to sync my podcasts to my iphone, the podcasts are a mix of downloaded podcasts and programmes recorded via getiplayer. They're all BBC programmes.

As saved some will have already been tagged as podcasts and others not, likewise they may have missing or incorrect itunesmediatype tags. I generally straighten these issues out before importing the playlist into itunes.

On my current batch however of the 627 files only 584 are visible in itunes, I can see them either as music files or podcasts but that's all I can see.

I can't see any glaring difference between missing files and those that display (see screenshots)

Any ideas?

Though I don't have a solution to your particular problem, a work-around might be to use Copy Trans Manager to put the files onto your phone, instead of iTunes. I have used this tool successfully to work around limitations in iTunes.

https://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager/

Which of those two is missing? If it's "Captains of the Sands", maybe there's something odd about the quote character in the filename? What sort of filesystem is J:, is it local or remote?

Peter

J: is a local NTFS drive, and yes it's Captains of the Sands.

I'll rename and try again

Peter, that's sorted out quite a lot of them, still got quite a few left that just seem to be made up of normal characters, from the playlist:

#EXTINF:1590,BBC World Service - Being Bisexual
20170801_The Documentary.m4a
#EXTINF:1380,BBC World Service - Mother of deceased 'IS' fighter - Nicola Benyahia
20170802_HARDtalk.m4a
#EXTINF:1590,BBC World Service - Hadraawi The Somali Shakespeare
20170802_The Documentary.m4a

In fact all of the remaining issues are either on Hardtalk or The Documentary.

Might rename and retry.

Nope, renaming didn't work

That is also an idea. I hate iTunes, thanks Tony

If it's the filenames and tags causing the problems, you should file bug reports with both iTunes and the podcast publishers.

On July 2, 2010, Tony made a significant change to my life by steering me to CopyTrans Manager. Seven years later it is still the only music management program I use, and I recommend it highly.

Even though I use the limited function free version, on more than one occasion I have received fast and appropriate technical support when needed.

I have found a few bugs in the program that apparently only affect obsolete hardware that I, being a total Luddite, insist on continuing to use. (Example: On a second generation iPod Shuffle, you have to add the songs to your transfer list in the order you want them to play. If you rearrange them in the list before actually loading them to the Shuffle, they play in the order that they were added to the list regardless, not in the rearranged order you specified. Trivial, easy to work around.)

CopyTrans Manager: Highly recommended.

tanstaffl.

The biggest thing that Copy Trans Manager works around for me is this goddamn thing:

MediaMonkey which I use already synced the files fine

I'm interested in trying MediaMonkey and had given myself a note to try it out just yesterday.

How did that work for you? I'm always interested to read about other options for getting music onto my iPhone, without using iTunes. I've already got a CopyTrans licence (yes, I paid for it) but I believe there's still a lot the be improved.

*sigh* I miss the simplicity of Emplode : simply drag a folder from the explorer to it and click sync. Why is this so hard to do for Apple?? To be honest: this is one of the biggest reasons I'm considering switching to Android : because I love the fact that you can connect these phones to the computer and then simply drag files to its music folder, after which they will play instantly.

Not sure yet. But here's what I have done so far:

- I'm trying to load my MP3 library onto my phone so that, while I'm still trying to work out how to get the empeg into the new car, I can still listen to stuff through Apple Car Play. Temporarily, mind you.

- I have found that the standard Apple library way of handling and playing songs is woefully inadequate compared to the empeg (no surprise there). Examples: No easy "unshuffle around the currently playing song", no hierarchical playlists, no "ignore as child", no inserting songs or albums into the current running order. Though I'm working around the former (unshuffle around current song) with an app called "Vox" which seems to handle that if I jump through the correct hoops.

- The lack of "ignore as child" means that I can't safely mix my back-episodes of CarTalk in with my music files, otherwise I'd get cartalk episodes mixed in with my music.

- So one thing I tried was to use Copy Trans Manager to put the files onto the phone as if they were Podcasts. No go: it wouldn't do it, I can't move the CarTalk Mp3 files into the Podcasts category.

- So I tried to turn them all into AudioBooks. This works, I can do this in Copy Trans Manager, which indeed puts them into the Audio Books category on the phone, but then there's a problem: They're all out of sequence, playing out of order, even when I change all their disc/track numbers to be in order.

- So I tried using Media Monkey to change them all to the "Podcast" type (Something Copy Trans Manager refused to do), and change them to the "Podcast" genre. Then used Copy Trans Manager to load them onto the phone. Still no dice: Copy Trans Manager still refused to put them into the "Podcast" category on the phone.

- So I tried using Media Monkey to load them onto the phone. This "seemed" to work, with Media monkey giving me the option to sync the podcast files onto the phone, and the songs seeming to load.

- But now, after using Media Monkey on my phone, now Copy Trans Manager says that the itunes library on the phone is corrupted. Media Monkey thought it was fine. Itunes, I'm not sure, since I'm deliberately not using iTunes due to its "Ima erase all your shit" dialog box that I posted about earlier.

- But despite the warning that the phone got corrupted by Media Monkey, it *seems* to play the podcasts that I loaded onto the phone with Media Monkey OK in the quick test I did. And they seem to be in order, too.

So, so far, cautiously optimistic that Media Monkey solved the podcast problem, but worried it might have corrupted my library on the phone.

See my previous post. If it is the same bug I have experienced, you have to add the tracks to CopyTrans Manager in the order you want them to play. You cn re-arrange the tracks all you want after you have created the upload list, but when you actually load them into your player they will air in the order that they were added to the list, not in the order you arranged them after creating the list in the first place.

tanstaafl.

It went very well, I've used MediaMonkey for years but had never used it to sync to my iphone, very simple.

Hmm. Have you tried rebooting the phone?

I'll try that! Good idea.

I believe you. But some things surprise me about this.

1. My file names are carefully designed to be alphanumerically sequential in the correct order, so when I group-select and drag-drop the files into the application, they theoretically should drop into the application in, at the very least, alphabetical order by filename. So I shouldn't need to individually add over a hundred files one-at-a-time just to control the ordering.

2. The problem that we're both describing, I haven't noticed it being an issue with the music albums I load onto the phone. When they're in the Music category, they always play in the order that I expect, as long as I'm using a player app on the phone (such as Vox) which honors the ordering. I only encounter the problem with files I have configured as Audiobooks and trying to play them in the iBooks app on the phone.

Maybe not as much as this will... Below is an excerpt from a long email series I had with Kasimer, the head troubleshooter at CopyTrans Manager, in which we discuss the fact that the problem occurs only with the fourth generation iPod Shuffle, all other devices (including my second generation Shuffle) operate properly.

=============================================
CopyTrans Support <[email protected]>

2/24/15

to me
Doug,

Thanks for sending the screenshots and the log files.

While reviewing your logs, I could not detect any errors occurring in
CopyTrans Manager.

However, I could indeed reproduce the problem on my side. It looks like
the iPod Shuffle 4G ignores playlists created on the device and track
order in those playlists. Unfortunately there is not much we can do to
go around this limitation.

===============================================

As mentioned above, this is not a big problem for me. It means I have to drag my audiobooks into CopyTrans Manager one book at a time, in the order I want them to play, rather than drag them all at once. That comes to an extra four or five mouse clicks every couple of weeks.

tanstaafl.

How do you handle the podcast playback on the iPhone side?

A few years back I finally decided to separate the podcast part from my music in iTunes, and moved to a dedicated app on the iPhone called Overcast (http://overcast.fm). The app is free, and offers a $10 a year subscription for supporting the developer and to gain the ability to upload your own media files to be treated like podcasts.

There has been an apple podcasts app since iOS8.

But many have turned it off via settings/general/restrictions. As an app it insists on managing all podcasts, even the ones formally managed by other apple apps.

Me or Tony? I set all my podcasts to be music files, create a playlist sync that to the phone and play via Denon Audio Player (seems to lose it's place in my playlist/audio file less often than the music app).

Forgot all about this, just wasted an hour battling with my new iphone 8. Upgrading mediamonkey now, hopefully that will resolve my issue.

I'll put a word in for Pocket Casts. I love it. It made my transition to iPhone much easier because I had an account with them that syncs my subscriptions, and even kept track of which episodes I hadn't listened to. It also has a ton of options for episode management, playlist creation, and playback control. The developers are pretty great too.

This issue is killing me!

MediaMonkey transfers aren't reliably seen by either apple Music player or Denon Music on my phone, iTunes is still missing huge numbers of files. In my current podcast playlist it shows 517 out of 541 files.

In MediaMonkey I can see (and play) all 541, so nothing like missing files or bad paths.

I'd kind of resigned myself to this but I've been listening to an amazing podcast which has skipped straight from Episode 6 to Episode 10. I need to listen to those missing episodes!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p071k0jv

I did try CopyTrans but can't remember the reasons why I didn't end up using it.

Just in case anyone's interested I've attached the playlist

Just tried CopyTrans again, it gives me an error but no reason, just error reading file.

Just resynced with MediaMonkey and all tracks appear and are playable on my iPhone.

Just a shame that sometimes MM synced playlist and/or tracks aren't visible on the phone...

Right bloody pain. But at least I can listen to Ep 7 of Paradise.

I have used CopyTrans Manager for years and have found their technical support to be responsive and excellent.

tanstaafl.

Still struggling with this, as Peter advised it's characters, e.g.

Accented letters
Non standard punctuation marks (just found a strange long dash along with the quote mark Peter identified)
Some standard punctuation marks, I know semi colon is an issue

Is there a utility I can use to strip out these? I guess if I knew them all then I could do it EditPad but seeing as I don't...

p.s. Happy New Year, hope everyone's well

I just went through something similar, or at least related to your problem. I had an eBook that would not display properly on my Kindle due to weird punctuation problems, the most prominent being that every single-quote mark displayed as single-quote followed by a space. That meant every contraction showed as "can' t" instead of "can't", and sometimes the " t" would show up on a new line..

The odd thing was, when I converted the .mobi file to Microsoft Word, the problem was not there. It was only when I changed the .mobi file to plain text that I could see what was happening. Every single-quote, every double-quote was in non-ascii form that Word could deal with in a .docx file, but my Kindle could not. I'm guessing it had something to do with Unicode rather than ascii formatting.

I edited the text file in Word as a text file and after more than 6,000 global search and replaces was able to get a file I could change back to .mobi that the Kindle was happy with. Not perfect, by any means, but readable.

Interestingly, the book was #1 of a four-book series, and the other three (at first glance, anyway) seem to be OK.

It's not likely that my experience will be of much use to you, except maybe if you can create some sort of .txt file from your list of music, the weird characters will show up much more plainly and can be fixed with MS-Word.

tanstaafl.

Back in the old days, I used to use MP3TagStudio to do things like that. http://www.magnusbrading.com/mp3ts/

Looks like it hasn't been updated in quite some time, but it might still work for you.

Magnus stopped supporting mp3TagStudio about 10 years ago, and unless you currently have a working copy of it, or have files from an old copy tucked away in a backup hiding in some dusty corner, you will be out of luck because even if you do find the setup files, it won't run without a valid mp3ts.rg file that contains the registration code.

It just so happens that I do have all the necessary files to install and run mp3TagStudio, and instructions I wrote to myself on how to get it going again. PM me if you are interested...

And yes, I still use mp3TagStudio to manage my audio library tags. I've glanced at more modern, more capable programs, but they're different from what I'm used to, so they can't be any good!

tanstaafl.

At one time, I did have all of those things, but that was many computers ago, and I'm sure the mp3ts.rg file is long lost to the annals of time.

Once I had my library of mp3 files all tagged the way I wanted them, I just didn't need the batch processing capabilities that it offered and kinda stopped using it somewhere along the way.

MP3TS is one of the few "old Windows programs" that I can't live without. Though my Mac is my daily driver, I still keep a Windows laptop, and a Windows VM on the Mac, for just these situations.

I have 20,610 audio files in my computer that have been treated with MP3TS, which includes about 3600 audio books. Oh, wait, each of those audio books is split into, on average, 10 files. That runs my total up over 53,000 MP3TS tags in my library. It would have been a long, tough road without Magnus Brading!

To the best of my knowledge, every one of those tags is exactly the same format, like this:

tanstaafl.

Some of those old programmes were absolutely brilliant. I used to use Audiograbber to rip my CDs and MP3Manager developed in FoxBase by a guy called Petr for tagging etc. MediaMonkey etc are much more capable but nowhere near as easy to use.

I really need to figure out RegEx, I'm pretty sure it's doable in that.