Data import
File types
In the file types panel you can configure all supported file types. You can add and remove file types with the button on the right side. You can activate or deactivate files types with the check box on the left of each file type. A file type has a suffix and a mime type. The mime type is sent to the client whenever a file with the corresponding suffix is requested. During a database import only files with active file types are imported. So deactivating or removing a file type has no effect on the files which are already in the database until the next update. The same applies to content type (audio/video) and protection flag. Mime type changes are reflected as once, i.e. if you change a mime type, the new type is sent with files of the corresponding suffix. If you specify a mime type without a slash, e.g. "mp4", the first part "audio/" or "video/" is added according to the content type. Otherwise the mime type is used as is. You can also reset the file types to the MyTunesRSS defaults at any time.
Miscellaneous options
You can enter a comma separated list of drop words for the artists. So if you enter "the", for all artists a leading "the" will be stripped of during import. So for example "The Beatles" will be imported as "Beatles". This makes artists like "The Beatles" be found in the index at letter "B" instead of "T". You can enter as many drop words as you like separated by comma.
The iTunes XML files comntain a comment field for each track. This field is imported as the tracks's comment. If you are using watch folders, the comment data is taken from the ID3 tags of MP3 files. You can specify in the configuration what ID3 tag fields are used for creating the tracks's comment. You need to be familiar with the ID3 tag format to use this feature. You can use the following ID3v2.3 frames (and the corresponding ID3v2.2 ones) for that comment:
APIC (not useful though) COMM Tnnn TXXX Wnnn WXXX
The following line is a sample entry:
Album=${TAL,TALB}, Copyright=${TCR,TCOP}
The value specifies the text used in the comment. Everything is used as is and all occurrences of ${xxx} are replaced with the corresponding tag information. You need to specify the name of the v2.2 frame and the name of the v2.3 frame separated by comma. The example above uses the ID3 frames TAL/TALB and TCR/TCOP (ID3v2.2/ID3v2.3) in the comment field. So with TAL/TALB for example being "The best of" and TCR/TCOP being "(C) 2007 Sample Music Corp." the comment field would be "Album=The best of, Copyright=(C) 2007 Sample Music Corp.".
The full specification of the ${xxx} tokens is the following:
${ID3v2.2Frame,ID3v2.3Frame;Default;Flags}
The first part (before the first semicolon) is explained above. The optional default is used in the case specified frame does not exist or has an empty value. With no default, an empty string is used. The only currently supported flag is "M" which means that all matching frame values are concatenated while without this flag only the first matching frame is used. This applies to COMM frames for example where an ID3 tag can have multiple ones. The following example means: use the COM/COMM frame values as comment. Write "no comment" if no such frame is available and use all COM/COMM frames if multiple are present.
${COM,COMM;no comment;M}
Since the MP4 format is used for lots of different codecs (e.g. DivX, Apple Lossless Audio, etc.) you might want to exclude some of them. You can do this by entering the official codec names in a comma separated list. If you enter for example "div1,divx,dx50,xvid" here, all DivX files will be excluded from a database import.
Normally the artwork from MP3 files or AAC files is imported into the database. Also image files in the file system are used if available for all file types. If there is a file called "The Simpsons.mov" and an image called "The Simpsons.mov.jpg", the image is imported as the track image for the Simpsons movie. The image suffixes "jpg", "png" and "gif" are searched in that order. An image in the file system will override any images from MP3 or AAC files. You can specify to not import image data at all.
Only files that have changed since the last import are read for performance reasons. This applies to the change date of tracks in iTunes XML files as well as files dates when watch folders are used. Sometimes iTunes causes problems when it does not update the timestamp in the XML correctly. If you think the import is not working correctly, you can check the option to ignore timestamps and have all files imported regardless of their timestamp.