I would never convert a lossless collection to a lossey format...especially not to make iTunes happy. Your approach makes much more sense. It has been years since I have kept my personal collection on an internal drive.

I would recommend working on a single library at a time. Put one aside, except for listening of course 🙂

If the tag information in your tracks is in synch with iTunes there will be no problem linking to iTunes. Make whatever changes you'd like in Yate and if the open tracks are linked, the changes will be force fed back to iTunes. iTunes over the years has had issues keeping files up to date. If you find this is the case, you can always drag tracks from iTunes into Yate which guarantees that the 'link' can be established. Once the basic linkage metadata is corrected or imported from iTunes you can go back to initiating the link from Yate.

I can't see any reason, other than desire, to add custom identifiers, but doing so is certainly easy in Yate. I have helped people out who are using custom metadata to enable batch runs to synch multiple libraries. (Yep they want to keep the multiple libraries).

Whichever route you go down make sure that the iTunes Advanced Preference 'Keep iTunes media folder organized' is NOT checked. This little option has the potential of undoing things....especially any renames or moves which take place. Further, it will potentially split albums into different folders and as I've said here many times, "one album-one folder".

The main goal should be to completely eliminate one library. Yate will only work on one at a time and that's the 'default' library which is accessible via iTunes at any given moment.

Yate v3.10 is pretty much ready to go and will be released in the next week or two. There is a single iTunes related piece of new functionality which my make your life easier. If your track based metadata is missing or completely out of synch with the metadata in the iTunes library, v3.10 allows you to retain the so called iTunes Permanent ID and use that to link the files. This definitely only works with one library but it was implemented to assist in those "getting stuff in shape to fix" situations. The iTunes documentation has also been enhanced. If you'd like, drop a line to support@2manyrobots.com requesting preview access and we'll send you a link. You can get an early start on the new functionality.

The offer is of course open to others as well.

Thanks for that 2MR2!

Hope you can help a Yate newbie to put this to practice, and answer some practical questions.

1. One Library:
You advice is to completely eliminate one library.--> both ALAC and AAC version will in the same library
As said I now have 2 libraries,
AAC: on the internal macbook drive, iTunes Media folder location: /Users/Wilfred/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music
ALAC: on the external drive, iTunes Media folder location /disk2/iTunes LossLess/iTunes Music

ToDo;
- Check both AAC and ALAC tracks with Yate that tag info is good.
- "Add to Library" of the ALAC tracks with 'Keep iTunes media folder organized' and 'Copy files to iTunes Media Folder when adding to library' NOT checked
Correct?

Will every track is then visible twice in iTunes once the AAC version and once the ALAC version?

2. Now the "linking" making changes to the track info.
Do I first need to step-up the link to itunes files?

Let's assume I did step 1. and they I'm not connected to the external drive.
I'll start updating track / album information in Yate syncing it back to iTunes all for the AAC version of the files.

Back at my external drive, I want to have all those changes also embedded in my ALAC

How do I go about that??

Thanks,
Wilfred

Hi sorry, Safari just crashed and I lost my length reply. 🙁

If the tracks are duplicates which seems to be the case, one library is a bad idea. I read your first post a little too fast. Having the same tracks with the same metadata in a single library will confuse some players, streamers and even potentially Yate as searching is primarily down by metadata. Perhaps for my curiosity you can let me know why you want both copies in an iTunes library.

If we go down the road where you retain both libraries you can work completely on one and once its in the shape you want, you can use Yate to synch the metadata between the two sets of tracks. While it is true that Yate wasn't designed for it, there are quite a few people who maintain separate libraries and update one or the other and then run Batch actions to synchronize the two. A common folder structure and file naming convention certainly helps. v3.10 adds more capability to do this as it enables the loading of an arbitrary track and the running of an action against it.

There are other synching solutions out there as skyfinger mentions. I cannot comment on them as I haven't used them. Frankly I decided a while ago to do all my iTunes testing on my personal collection. Somehow it seemed only fair. As a result I've completely trashed and rebuilt my library numerous times, simply by running a Yate batch action overnight. One positive of doing this is that if the library is large, iTunes actually runs better for a while before it messes up the library again.

Due to my incorrect answer to your first post, some of your subsequent questions get invalidated. Except for course for your absolute correct assessment to keep both those iTunes options unchecked.

So, if I seem to have a correct call on the situation now, let me know and we can go further.

There's a new 'interacting with iTunes' topic in 3.10 which you can view here:

http://2manyrobots.com/Test/Yate/MenuFileLinkToiTunes.html

There are some references to v3.10 functionality but it should better describe the overall functionality. Documentation is obviously not my forte.

by the way Thanks for the quick replies!

Thanks for all your support, 2MR2!

No worries when it takes a bit longer 😉 happy holidays!

Looking forward to it. If it helps I can install V3.10 ...