Here's a short guide to tag your Macintosh's music library from a Windows computer. Why would you want to do this you ask? Well for one, iTunes is notorious for incorrectly tagging metadata. In the past for me it has done things like tag certain files only iTunes, but in finder/explorer they are untagged or given strange unicode characters. Another big problem was iTunes randomly making duplicates of files. Tagging your files manually on iTunes is a slow and tedious process and you are also limited to only a few metadata fields. You could use a program like mp3tag with Wine, but it's not as fast as using MusicBee.
On the Mac side you need to:
- Enabled file sharing on Mac OS X Music folder with read/write permissions.
- Enable read/write permissions on "iTunes Music" folder! You must make sure you click "get info" on this folder, then click the cogwheel and go "apply to enclosed items" or all your albums be read only. I couldn't edit tags until I realized every single album folder and it's content were read only.
- Enabled SMB on Mac OS X
- Disable "keep iTunes media folder organized" in iTunes.
- Disable sleep in power settings. If your Mac goes into sleep mode, it will disable all network activity and you won't be able to tag files.
On the Windows side you need to:
- Open MusicBee and go to the menu and choose file > library > create new library. Alternatively you can right click on "music" > choose library > create library.
- If you can't see your Mac press "Add network share" and navigate to "your mac's name here\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music"
- Library name can be whatever you want - example "Music on my Mac".
- choose folders > scan music files from the following folder should be "your mac's name here\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music"
- check "scan the folders for new files on each startup"
- press Add Library
That's it your done! It took about 8 minutes to scan 2060 MP3/AAC files over wifi. If your on Ethernet it should be much quicker to rescan your library and update tags.
Topic: Tagging your music library over the network (Windows tagging Mac OS X) (Read 3968 times)