Pure Vinyl Bookmarks

[Robert Peirce]

I'm trying to move a music database from one hd, where I had my photographs
[Pictures], to another devoted just to music [Music]. All has gone well
except for my Pure Vinyl/Pure Music digital LP transfers.

As a temporary measure I changed the name of the Pictures drive to Photos and
created a symbolic link in /Volumes on my Mac Mini from Music to Pictures.
This enables Pure Music to find the tracks and it works fine.

Pure Vinyl uses iTunes as a music server and it was easy to use an Applescript
to change the file paths for the affected LPs. This also works fine.

Pure Vinyl writes LPs to caf files and creates small bookmarks with the .m4a
extension to load into iTunes and to point to the correct location in the caf
file for each track. When I opened an m4a file in kid3 I could see a path to
the old location [/Volumes/Pictures]. I changed that to the new
[/Volumes/Music] and it worked fine. However, when I removed the symlink the
track wouldn't play. Apparently there are multiple path locations in the
bookmark. Does anybody know how to find them?

[Robert Peirce]

The problem is moving your music database from one HD to another with a
different name. Channel D recommends against using a different name but
sometimes it is necessary. If you have this problem, here’s what to do
about it.

Background:
When I started my music database I put it on an HD called Pictures,
which is where I kept my photographs. Well, as I digitized more LPs
with Pure Vinyl, music started to take over this drive so I got another
one, called it Music, and put all my music there. Channel D would have
preferred I called Music Pictures and Pictures something else but that
wasn’t going to work.

iTunes was able to relocate all my CDs and other standard stuff but not
the Pure Vinyl bookmarks. The file tab in iTunes still showed iTunes
pointing to Pictures. I got an AppleScript to change that from Pictures
to Music and that worked. iTunes now looked in Music to find the
bookmarks. However, that didn’t work either!

It turns out Pure Vinyl hard codes the path to the caf file it produces.
The bookmarks all said /Volumes/Pictures. Channel D had warned me not
to change the HD name. Now I knew why.

Solutions:
1) This is easy and it works. I changed Pictures to Photos and created
a symbolic link from Music to Pictures in /Volumes. This can be done
without worrying about where iTunes is looking. If this solves your
problem, go and do likewise. If you want a more elegant solution read on.

2) I first changed iTunes as described above. Next I wrote a simple C
program to go through the bookmarks, look for Pictures, and change it to
Music. Last I wrote a shell script to go through all the bookmarks and
run the C program on each. Before trying this I backed up my database
and ran tests on several albums. Then I did the whole database. When
this was done I removed the symbolic link and everything worked except
for one LP, Pictures at an Exhibition. It turns out if the path
contained Pictures more than once it would crash. I could have fixed
this but not for one LP. I just re-rendered it.

If you are confronted by this problem and want to use my second
solution, let me know, provide your email address and I will mail a zip
file to you. I recommend not doing this unless you are familiar with C
programs and Unix shell scripts. The C program is crude; I haven’t
written one in over 10 years, but it works. The shell scripts are a bit
crude for the same reason. However, the overall process is simple if
you know what you are doing.