Tips for Mac users and importing your music

[stokessd]

I've been using iTunes for years to stream my music to several Airport Express units, and take the digital output from them to DACs of my own design.  I'm now experimenting with high bitrate music and with Apple officially abandoning one of the greatest little apple gadgets in decades, I'm forced to sneak back into the half-baked linux world.  

I keep two libraries in iTunes.  One is all my music in MP3 format (320kbps lame encoded), and the other is ALAC and MP3 files (for the albums I've bought in MP3 format).  I used "To Audio Converter" to convert my ALAC files back to a friendlier FLAC format and make sure all the metadata is good and there is album art etc.  

I've been playing with moode for a while and it's impressive.  But MPD is super brittle and fails all the time with the hidden files (dot files) that the mac loves to sprinkle everywhere.  

So you'll want to get rid of them if possible.  I loaded all my music on an external drive and deleted the dot files from it.  Before I did that, Moode said that I had 607 tracks instead of the 22244 tracks that are on the disk.  

Here's how you get rid of the hidden files with some basic unix commands:

To see what files are there CD into a directory that will be your top level (this command will work down the tree, but not up) and use this command:

Code:

find . -name ".*" -print

Then if you are happy with what it's finding, you can delete all the files with this:

Code:

find . -mindepth 1 -name '.*' -exec rm -rf {} \;

I'd suggest you start down in the tree within a single album directory to test it and then go up to the top and blast away.

Hope that helps someone,
Sheldon

[zazouboy]

I've been using iTunes for years to stream my music to several Airport Express units, and take the digital output from them to DACs of my own design.  I'm now experimenting with high bitrate music and with Apple officially abandoning one of the greatest little apple gadgets in decades, I'm forced to sneak back into the half-baked linux world.  

I keep two libraries in iTunes.  One is all my music in MP3 format (320kbps lame encoded), and the other is ALAC and MP3 files (for the albums I've bought in MP3 format).  I used "To Audio Converter" to convert my ALAC files back to a friendlier FLAC format and make sure all the metadata is good and there is album art etc.  

I've been playing with moode for a while and it's impressive.  But MPD is super brittle and fails all the time with the hidden files (dot files) that the mac loves to sprinkle everywhere.  

So you'll want to get rid of them if possible.  I loaded all my music on an external drive and deleted the dot files from it.  Before I did that, Moode said that I had 607 tracks instead of the 22244 tracks that are on the disk.  

Here's how you get rid of the hidden files with some basic unix commands:

To see what files are there CD into a directory that will be your top level (this command will work down the tree, but not up) and use this command:

Code:

find . -name ".*" -print

Then if you are happy with what it's finding, you can delete all the files with this:

Code:

find . -mindepth 1 -name '.*' -exec rm -rf {} \;

I'd suggest you start down in the tree within a single album directory to test it and then go up to the top and blast away.

Hope that helps someone,
Sheldon

Hello,

Thanks for the tip!

Using a MacBook Pro, there is a simpler way to do it with Terminal.

With the USB drive or the external HDD attached to my Mac, I perform the following commands :

mount

(to see the volumes and be able to copy the path of the one I want to clean, followed by)

dot_clean /Volumes_of_your_choice

(tada !)

Hope this helps

Kind regards,

Renaud

[Tim Curtis]

Interesting. I didn't know that command existed.

[TheOldPresbyope]

Nice alternative to invoking the death-defying 'rm -rf' which, if improperly handled, can remove an entire file system.