Order of the Bath

I only require iTunes on Windows to manage an iPod. I am sure there are a lot of other people who do the same. I use other software to manage my music library, partly for historical reasons and partly because we like more control than iTunes offers.

For us there has always been a feature missing from iTunes—the ability to update/synchonise the library with a music collection obtained from other sources. Perhaps people who use it for their music management also miss this feature e.g. when buying tracks from Amazon, but all through its (currently) eleven versions, Apple has failed to add the capability. For that reason, I was grateful some years ago to discover a (Windows) program called iTLU—iTunes Library Updater by Borja Fernandez which did this for me; I think iTunes was at version 9 then. Version 1.22 (2008) was the last version found and it was known to work on Windows XP, I don’t know about any later versions. As well as adding new tracks it will clean out “orphaned” entries for files that no longer exist.

Then, calamity, Apple published their slightly controversial iTunes 11 version and it all stopped working. This was a major rewrite and, it seems, they had removed the API that iTLU relies on to function. Also, since then, the author’s web site http://itlu.ownz.ch/wordpress/ has vanished.

But I can now gleefully report, with iTunes 11.0.4, it all works again. It must have been an oversight that Apple have (silently) corrected. Just a pity that there isn’t a Mac version of iTLU.

This entry was posted on 30 Jul 2013 at 10:40 by Rick and is filed under Hi-Fi & Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.