Ongoing challenges
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.
December 7th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Hi, I just wanted to say that I love your program and it helps me keep all of my movies and tv shows organized. A lifesaver. I’ve been using it since version 0.2 I think. Lately though, I have been having a problem under 0.6 and 0.7, something that I think I caused and don’t know how to fix. I keep getting this error when I try to tag something from within iTunes:
AppleScript Error
iTunes got an error: Can’t get track 1 of library playlist 1 whose database ID of it = 10006. (-1728)
I’m not sure what to do about this. Is there a way to completely uninstall Lostify and then reinstall it? Any help would be appreciated!
December 10th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
Just a quick note to thank you so much for your continuing support on Lostify.
It is a fantastic app which has saved me so much time. (To say nothing of helping me organize my videos better.
Thanks so much for all of your hard work. I look forward to the next release.
December 22nd, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Firstly i wanted to thank you for Lostify, and for all the time and work you must put in to create such a great and useful application.
I have only just started to add metadata to my 350+ movies and 1200+ TV episodes, and having noticed a small issue, thought now the best time to ask about it.
What’s happening is when i add ratings (New Zealand) to each file, they are all displayed in iTunes correctly, but only the G & PG are showing up in Front Row. I can’t get the M, R13 etc to display. This seems weird i know, and i have had a look around the net to see if i could find an answer to the problem, with no luck. I understand that it is quite possibly a Front Row issue, but wanted to check with you first, before i continue Lostifying my collection.
I’m using Lostify 7.0, iTunes 7.5 and Front Row 1.0 all running on Leopard.
Hope you can help
December 22nd, 2007 at 11:07 pm
rdb - thanks for using Lostify. That’s quite a media collection you’ve got!!
I tried adding some NZ ratings to a few movies, and saw the same thing you did in Front Row. I suspect it is probably a Front Row issue. The ratings that do show up (G, PG — the ones common to American/MPAA ratings) appear to be custom graphics (the same style as that used by the MPAA), so I suspect they are graphical resources in some shared framework (since the Front Row app itself doesn’t have any resources). Perhaps Apple haven’t gotten around to creating graphics for all the other ratings systems, since they don’t sell tagged movies into these markets yet? Just a theory.
December 23rd, 2007 at 1:04 pm
NONfinis - sorry for not replying sooner. It’s been a hectic month. To completely uninstall Lostify, you need to do two things in any order. (1) Quit Lostify and drop the application in the trash, and (2) in Finder, browse to ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts, and drop Lostify….scpt in the trash. (That’s Users/yourusername/Library/iTunes/Scripts). Note that within Lostify’s Options drawer, if you uncheck the box that says “Add Lostify to iTunes Script menu”, Lostify should perform step 2 for you. (Checking and unchecking that box simply copies the iTunes integration script into iTunes’ Scripts directory or removes it, respectively.)
Having said that, I’m not sure why it would be giving the error you describe; I’ve never seen it. Does it happen all the time, or only under certain circumstances? (Like when an iPod or Apple TV is connected? Or when Lostify is invoked from a playlist window other than the primary window?) Here’s what’s happening: when you invoke the Lostify… script in iTunes, it gets the iTunes database IDs of the currently selected tracks, and sends them off to the Lostify application. Lostify then contacts iTunes, and for each database ID, looks up the track to get (& set) the iTunes metadata for that track. It is this lookup that is apparently failing. We send iTunes a command that basically says, “find the track of the first library playlist whose database ID is xxxxxx”.
All I can think of that might be going wrong is, either Lostify is begin invoked with a bogus database ID (which shouldn’t happen), or else the “first library playlist” (or what should be the whole iTunes library, if my understanding is correct) is not the correct playlist I should be looking in. (That’s why I suggested checking what other library playlists might be connected, and wondered whether that affected the outcome.) Either way, I should be catching this error and reporting it in a more grammatically correct way than is happening now.
December 29th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Hi Lowell - I get the same error reported by NONfinis.
Don’t know whether this makes a difference or not, but I keep my iTunes Library on a separate external drive because my built-in drive is only 80GB. Don’t know if that’s what’s causing the problem.
Two versions of iTunes prior to the current release, I didn’t get this error. It really only started happening around the August-September time-frame. However, even then my iTunes library was on a separate drive.
Thanks, and keep up the great work!
Tom
December 30th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Just a quick thanks for your brilliant app, editing release dates on TV Shows had been bugging me for a while. Other apps seem poorly designed but yours is great! Thank you!
January 1st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Happy New Year to you!
Thankyou for your explanation to my question above, it makes perfect sense.
I now have another little problem, i wonder if you could help me with. I’m having problems changing cover art on movies which have gone thru Lostify. The problem seems to arise when the new cover art is a different file size to the original one. I’m using iTunes to do the changing, and it causes iTunes to freeze and corrupts the movie file so it can no longer be played. I have no problem editing the cover art before the file has been Lostified, only after.
I hope this makes sense, and i wouldn’t bother you with it except for the file corruption bit, which makes it somewhat serious.
Any ideas what might be causing this, or how to get around the problem?
Thanks again rdb
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:35 pm
rdb — thanks for the New Year’s wishes, and same to you. The problem you describe sounds serious indeed… but unfortunately, I haven’t been able to duplicate it yet. If you could email me more details about what you’re doing when the problem happens, I’d be glad to look into it further. My email is lowello at g mail dot com. Thanks! Specifically,
(a) what order are you setting what bits of data in iTunes and Lostify (like, first title & cast listing in Lostify, then photo in iTunes, then modify data X in Lostify, then add a bigger picture in iTunes, or whatever),
(b) what file sizes are the movies and cover art you’re working with, and
(c) what was the original encoder for the movies? (ffmpegx? isquint? visual hub? etc.)
January 5th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Hi Lowel, thanks for your help with my little problem above (Jan 1st 3:20pm).
For anyone out there that might have read or may read the said post, the problem ended up being me not giving iTunes enough time to add the new cover art. Having changed cover art in iTunes many times before, i panicked when it took longer than a few seconds and Forced Quit, hence corrupting the movie file i was editing. After an email to Lowel and a very quick response, we soon worked out that i needed to give iTunes a minute or two to do it’s thing. All is now working perfectly! I have movie files with fantastic new ratings and credits, and sporting newly improved artwork!!
Thanks again Lowel
January 15th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
The foregoing problem I reported by NONfinis and also observed by me has disappeared when I upgraded to iTunes 7.6 (build 29)!!!
Anyone else tried iTunes 7.6?
January 17th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Hi and thanks for the great utility! I’ve been working over the Christmas period, while time permitted to organize and finally tag most of my encoded movies (over 200+) of them. One thing which I’ve noticed is that while the integration work you’ve done with iTunes is very handy, especially for movies which have already been imported, what would help out tremendously is some form of IMDB integration.
When I look at a time breakdown, the bulk of effort is put into scanning IMDB for the often times very popular title and performing a copy/paste. If there was a feature which would set this program apart from others, it would be the IMDB integration as this would save a tremendous amount of time.
Building on that, I also recently discovered a website called InternetMovieDB, which I love and hate as it includes poster art for nearly every film but costs money or equal uploads for downloads. What would be another interesting feature (one you have listed partially) is the ability to add Movie Art to the process but to also integrate into this website, which seems to be a mainstay.
Well just some quick notes, I must say again, thank you very much for investing your personal time on this project, it has helped me tremendously in the process of tagging my movies! Please let the broader lostify community know if you’re looking to go opensource and I’m sure myself as well as others would be glad to pitch in!
Best,
Craig
January 17th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Craig — I’m glad Lostify is working for you. I agree IMDB integration would be very cool. Unfortunately, IMDB’s licensing terms expressly forbid any type of data gathering, screen scraping, or data extraction from their website. The only integrations possible (without paying a hefty licensing fee to them) are using plain-text data tables from their FTP site, and even those seem to have disappeared lately. I would love it if they offered a free, public, online API/web service, but I have to ask myself–what’s in it for them?
I also looked around for the other site you mentioned (InternetMovieDB?), but Google did not help me find anything. Is the site still running?
January 19th, 2008 at 12:29 am
I broke my Lostify again.
This time I decided to add two entries into the Copyright Notice field by invoking a linebreak by way of the keystroke option-return. After the movie file is processed by Lostify, everything plays correctly, and the metadata show up fine, but when I attempt to open the same file again with Lostify I get two sequential error windows:
Error while parsing The Filename.mp4
Lostify operates only on valid MP4 files. No valid MP4 files found.
Am I out of luck with modifying these problem files?
Thanks again!
January 19th, 2008 at 5:20 am
consumer_q… there are some fields where Lostify can handle a line break, and there are other fields where it simply does not expect one. It generally comes down to: if Lostify or iTunes gives you a multi-line text view to enter text, the Lostify will accept embedded line breaks in that field when it reads files. If both iTunes and Lostify give you single-line text fields, Lostify will fail to parse the existing metadata if it encounters a line break in one of these fields. It just comes down to the algorithm Lostify uses to read the existing metadata.
In the future, I will try to update the parsing mechanisms so it won’t choke on any embedded line breaks, wherever they are. But in the mean time, if you want to “repair” a file in this state so Lostify can read it again… see my next blog post.
January 26th, 2008 at 6:41 am
Hi Lowell, thanks for the comments. I did find the movie poster db url: http://www.movieposterdb.com. Not sure if they have licensing terms similar to IMDB.
Best,
Craig
March 1st, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I am really loving the POTENTIAL of lostify, but cannot use it because Atomic Parsley can’t seem to do anything but crash. I am running it outside of iTunes, and continue to get a myriad of errors which all bear the same result - my original files can’t be retagged! Help!
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:45 am
Jeff, have you tried using Squeegify (a new tool I posted a few weeks ago, as an interim measure) to remove all the tags from problem files before tagging them again using Lostify? You can find it in the “Other Utilities” section of this page:
http://lostify.com/download/
If that still doesn’t work, please let me know more of the details: what kinds of tags does the file already have, and what errors are reported when Squeegify and/or Lostify fails?
March 30th, 2008 at 1:36 am
Hello! I have a little problem and I know YOU are the right person to ask! I knew it when you explained the name of your program!
I have encoded all my LOST DVDs (I also love the show!!!) with an earlier version of Handbrake that didn’t have the “Insert iPod Atom” checkbox so they won’t sync to my iPod. I can watch them on my computer but not on my iPod!!!
Is there a way that Lostify can insert the iPod atom into an mp4 file?
I really don’t want to re-encode all the three seasons again…
All the new movies encoded with the newer version of Handbrake work flawlessly. The funny thing, if you uncheck the “Insert iPod atom” box the files will not sync on iPods even when they are identical in every way, except for that atom, of course…
So, If you have ANY idea on how to insert that TAG or ATOM or whatever it is on an mp4 file… I would really appreciate your help!!!
Thanks! Alec. Costa Rica.
March 31st, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Alec… Lostify doesn’t currently do anything special about the “iPod atom” in MP4 files. If it’s there already, I believe Lostify leaves it alone; if it’s not present, Lostify doesn’t add it. The documentation for AtomicParsley seems to indicate it (AP) can write this tag, but my testing so far has been inconclusive.