• Pure Vinyl Bookmarks

    From Robert Peirce@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jan 18 13:25:08 2020
    I'm trying to move a music database from one hd, where I had my photographs [Pictures], to another devoted just to music [Music]. All has gone well
    except for my Pure Vinyl/Pure Music digital LP transfers.

    As a temporary measure I changed the name of the Pictures drive to Photos and created a symbolic link in /Volumes on my Mac Mini from Music to Pictures.
    This enables Pure Music to find the tracks and it works fine.

    Pure Vinyl uses iTunes as a music server and it was easy to use an Applescript to change the file paths for the affected LPs. This also works fine.

    Pure Vinyl writes LPs to caf files and creates small bookmarks with the .m4a extension to load into iTunes and to point to the correct location in the caf file for each track. When I opened an m4a file in kid3 I could see a path to the old location [/Volumes/Pictures]. I changed that to the new [/Volumes/Music] and it worked fine. However, when I removed the symlink the track wouldn't play. Apparently there are multiple path locations in the bookmark. Does anybody know how to find them?

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  • From Robert Peirce@21:1/5 to All on Tue Jan 28 10:49:09 2020
    The problem is moving your music database from one HD to another with a different name. Channel D recommends against using a different name but sometimes it is necessary. If you have this problem, here’s what to do
    about it.

    Background:
    When I started my music database I put it on an HD called Pictures,
    which is where I kept my photographs. Well, as I digitized more LPs
    with Pure Vinyl, music started to take over this drive so I got another
    one, called it Music, and put all my music there. Channel D would have preferred I called Music Pictures and Pictures something else but that
    wasn’t going to work.

    iTunes was able to relocate all my CDs and other standard stuff but not
    the Pure Vinyl bookmarks. The file tab in iTunes still showed iTunes
    pointing to Pictures. I got an AppleScript to change that from Pictures
    to Music and that worked. iTunes now looked in Music to find the
    bookmarks. However, that didn’t work either!

    It turns out Pure Vinyl hard codes the path to the caf file it produces.
    The bookmarks all said /Volumes/Pictures. Channel D had warned me not
    to change the HD name. Now I knew why.

    Solutions:
    1) This is easy and it works. I changed Pictures to Photos and created
    a symbolic link from Music to Pictures in /Volumes. This can be done
    without worrying about where iTunes is looking. If this solves your
    problem, go and do likewise. If you want a more elegant solution read on.

    2) I first changed iTunes as described above. Next I wrote a simple C
    program to go through the bookmarks, look for Pictures, and change it to
    Music. Last I wrote a shell script to go through all the bookmarks and
    run the C program on each. Before trying this I backed up my database
    and ran tests on several albums. Then I did the whole database. When
    this was done I removed the symbolic link and everything worked except
    for one LP, Pictures at an Exhibition. It turns out if the path
    contained Pictures more than once it would crash. I could have fixed
    this but not for one LP. I just re-rendered it.

    If you are confronted by this problem and want to use my second
    solution, let me know, provide your email address and I will mail a zip
    file to you. I recommend not doing this unless you are familiar with C programs and Unix shell scripts. The C program is crude; I haven’t
    written one in over 10 years, but it works. The shell scripts are a bit
    crude for the same reason. However, the overall process is simple if
    you know what you are doing.

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