I just posted Lostify 0.7.4 on the download page. There are no new features; it just fixes a bug reported by pharwood (thanks!), who found that 0.7.2 had inadvertently broken the iTunes integration features. That should be working now, but if anyone finds anything that doesn’t work as expected, please just let me know.

I have posted Lostify 0.7.3 on the download page. This release doesn’t add much new functionality, but fixes a few bugs from previous releases.  The biggest of them was my bungled bundling (in 0.7.2) of a version of AtomicParsley that wouldn’t work on Intel Macs running 10.4 (Tiger). That’s fixed now… in fact, the version now bundled in Lostify should run on anything from 10.3.9 forwards (even if Lostify itself won’t run on 10.3.x any more, sorry).  You can read about other changes in the version history or the release notes in the download itself.

Please visit the Download page to get the latest version!

I know Lostify 0.7 may be getting a little long in the tooth, and I had hoped to have the next major feature release (0.8) done long before now. Other priorities have caused me to put the new features on hold for a while, but bugs and fixes needed for 0.7 have reached a critical mass lately with new iTunes releases starting to break stuff.

I’m happy to report that a minor release is almost ready to see the light of day. The coding is done; it just needs a bit more testing and some updated release notes. Lostify 0.7.2 will address the following issues and bugs that have been discovered or reported:

• Starting with iTunes 7.7.1, iTunes embeds some new metadata fields in MP4 & AAC files. These new fields cause Lostify to choke with cryptic error messages like these:
  
  0.7.2 should more safely ignore tags that it does not understand.
• It used to be that iTunes’ “long descriptions” existed only in the iTunes database, but lately Apple have begun embedding them in MP4 files themselves. This is good news, but unfortunately Lostify does not always handle the presence of this new tag gracefully. 0.7.2 will not be thrown off by the presence of this tag — but it won’t yet allow you to set it either. (That will require some UI changes that are slated for 0.8.)
• Apple changed a little detail of iTunes’ AppleScript interface that broke Lostify’s iTunes integration. If you tried to invoke Lostify from within iTunes 7.7 or later, you might have seen:
  
  This has been addressed in 0.7.2.
• There have been scattered problems when re-tagging files that already contained metadata. Problems seem to occur more frequently when the file contains an embedded cast/crew list. (The bug is actually in AtomicParsley’s handling of padding in the metadata.) Past workaround attempts aside (Squeegify), I’m happy to report that John Pell helped me discover a superior way to address the problem (thanks!). Lostify 0.7.2 now handles the situation smoothly on its own.
• Apple has successively been adding more and more stuff to the XML metadata used to store cast & crew information. Consequently, Lostify’s cast list gets gunked up when you use it to display or edit metadata in a file that has additional info like this. Also, this non-crew information is lost when Lostify writes the file. In 0.7.2, any information embedded in this XML that is not recognized as a cast or crew member will be silently remembered and correctly written out again.
• Several people have contacted me about problems or shortcomings in the movie ratings available in Lostify. I have made several new ratings available, and tweaked others that were not in line with how iTunes content is tagged in practice.

If you’re aware of any serious bugs or shortcomings not mentioned here, please let me know as soon as possible. Thanks for your continued interest in Lostify!

In Fixing up Files That Lostify Won’t Read, I talked about using AtomicParsley from the command line to strip existing metadata out of MP4 files.  This can be useful in situations where either an MP4 file contains tags that are somehow corrupt, or where bugs in AtomicParsley prevent it from correctly handling fragmented tags left over from past editing. Users have particularly encountered these issues when using the Cast Listing feature to embed (and later try to modify or remove) cast listings in Lostify.

While I am working on tracking down and fixing the related bugs in AtomicParsley, I decided to offer a more drag-and-drop solution for users who need to take this drastic action of stripping all existing metadata from an MP4 file.  So I put together Squeegify.  Sorry, I know the name is awful, and the icon’s not much better.

Squeegify, like Lostify, is typically launched by drag and drop. But in all other respects, it’s rather the opposite of its older sibling. Where Lostify presents a user interface and has numerous options, Squeegify does not (the only UI is its dock icon).  Where Lostify allows adding and editing metadata, Squeegify strips it out. Where Lostify can optionally overwrite existing files, Squeegify always outputs a fresh copy in the same directory as the original.

It really is a one-trick pony, but if you need to remove corrupt or otherwise unwanted metadata from an MP4 file, try Squeegify.

I’ve been in communication with a handful of users experiencing some technical issues with Lostify. While work is progressing on the next release, I’ve taken time out to put together a couple small utilities to try to help these folks work around the existing issues. This post is about one of these two new “workaround” utilities: MetaFreshen.

Lostify’s iTunes integration apparently fails for a handful of users. When you enable the feature to run Lostify from within iTunes, or to have Lostify add tagged tracks to iTunes automatically, these users begin getting errors like “Can’t get track 1 of library playlist 1 whose database ID of it = xxxxx”. Extensive efforts to debug this problem have proven fruitless; it appears to be a bug in iTunes’ AppleScript support. If this error happens to you frequently in Lostify, please let me know and I’d be glad to work with you to research the issue… but until we can discover the root cause and address it, I may have a temporary solution for you in the form of MetaFreshen.

MetaFreshen is an AppleScript that runs completely from within iTunes (thus working around the bug). It reads the full-length description out of the selected MP4 file(s) and set iTunes’ long description field appropriately. This means you can get the nifty little “i” button on your own movies and TV shows, not to mention descriptions that are over 255 characters. As you probably know, this is normally done by Lostify itself, but (as mentioned above) this is only useful in situations where that integration is failing for reasons unknown.

After downloading and unzipping MetaFreshen, simply install it in the ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder. You run the script by choosing MetaFreshen from the scripts menu inside iTunes. There is no user interface; it should simply run and quietly update the description for each selected file.  I hope it’s helpful to someone.

Occasionally, you may come across an MP4 file that Lostify will fail to read. Lostify may complain that it’s an invalid MP4 file, but this is not always the case. It may simply mean that while trying to read the existing metadata, Lostify encountered something unexpected and gave up.

In the future, I’ll continue to try to loosen up Lostify’s parsing code, so this happens less and less. I’ll also probably add a “repair file” command to Lostify for serious cases where the metadata may actually be unreadable by AtomicParsley. But in the mean time, you can repair these files manually using AtomicParsley, the command-line tool upon which Lostify is based.

Here are some instructions for doing this type of repair, assuming no prior knowledge of how to use Terminal. If this is your first foray into Terminal, however, please take care to follow the instructions closely!

1. In Finder, go to where you’ve got Lostify saved. Control-click the Lostify application, and choose Show Package Contents.
2. In the new Finder window that comes up, navigate to Contents:Resources. The first file in that list should be AtomicParsley. Leave this window up where you can get it later.
3. Back in the original Finder window, navigate to where you can see the MP4 file you want to fix. Also leave this window up where you can get it later.
4. Open a Terminal window (Applications:Utilities:Terminal.app).
5. Drag AtomicParsley from the Resources window in step #2 into the terminal window. The unix-style path to that file appears at the Terminal prompt, followed by a space.
6. Now drag the MP4 file you want to modify from the Finder window into the same Terminal window; its unix-style path is appended to what you did in the previous step.
7. Now append an instruction onto the end of the command you’re building in the Terminal window:If you want to clear all existing metadata out of the file, type
   

   -P

   Or if you only want to reset the Copyright tag, for example, you could type

   --copyright 'some new copyright text'

   There are lots of commands you can give to AtomicParsley; AtomicParsley will list them out for you if you simply follow steps 1-5 above (to invoke AtomicParsley by itself with no parameters).

8. When you’re done building the command, press Enter and the AtomicParsley program should execute the command you requested on the MP4 file. If everything was entered correctly, it should say something about writing to a temp file.

The output file will appear in the same directory as the input file, with the same name and “-temp-12345″ (actually a random number) appended at the end of the filename. This output file should now be able to be read by Lostify again; the input file should remain unmodified.

I hope this helps folks who have, for one reason or another, encountered MP4 files that Lostify fails to read!

As some of you have noticed, there are some nagging problems with the version of AtomicParsley that is embedded in Lostify 0.7.  These problems don’t manifest themselves in all use cases, but if you’re trying to do certain things, you’ve probably encountered errors where Lostify was unable to tag files.  The problems occur sometimes when you’re trying to apply tags directly to (overwriting) a file that has already been tagged in the past.  This, in turn, happens: (1) whenever you’re invoking Lostify from iTunes; or (2) whenever you use the destination modes of “Same (Backup, then overwrite)” or “Same (Just overwrite)”.  In either of these cases, tagging files that have already been tagged in the past by Lostify will often fail.  The bug was introduced by some changes in AtomicParsley, the underlying tagging engine upon which Lostify is based.  The AtomicParsley team has not been particularly active in fixing bugs or furthering development for the past 8 months, so I’m looking into this myself and hope to be able to find & fix or work around the issues.  In the mean time, you should be able to avoid the problems by following these guidelines:

• If you’re going to invoke Lostify from within iTunes, do so only on files that have not already been tagged by Lostify;
• Otherwise, always invoke Lostify directly on the desired files from within Finder, and make sure the destination file mode is “Same (Trash original & replace)”.

Hopefully I’ll get these issues ironed out before too much longer.  Sorry about the problems, and have a Merry Christmas.

If you haven’t noticed yet, the Lostify site has gotten something of a facelift, not to mention its own domain name. Many, many thanks go to Jason Painter, a long-time user and tester of Lostify, for creating the new header graphic and donating the domain name.  It’s like we’re official now, or something.  Officially what, I don’t know…

I’ve just posted Lostify 0.7 for your utility and (if you’re a bit obsessive like me) enjoyment. The principal new feature is full support for cast & crew lists. These show up in iTunes when you click the “i” button next to the description of a movie or TV show. They also show up on the Apple TV, so you can see a little summary of the cast/crew while you’re deciding which movie to watch. There were a handful of other improvements and fixes, but I’ll refer you to the release notes for those.

I had hoped to provide support for embedding artwork in this release, but I haven’t finished it yet. I’m planning on that being the principal feature of the next release. Until then, folks will have to continue using other means to embed artwork.