iTunes 4.8 fiddles with file names on iPods
Scott Knaster, of Hacking iPod + iTunes, reports that with the recent release of iTunes 4.8 the file system of the ipod has been slightly changed. Pre 4.8 the file names on your iPod were the same as the file names on your Mac. When you navigated the hidden folders on the iPod it was a snap to figure out which file was which.Now all the file names are changed during the syncing process with your iPod. The new file names consist of four, seemingly, random characters in an effort to make the database on the iPod a little faster.
This shouldn't impact many users, but it is good to know.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
random said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
Is it meant to make the iPod a little faster or to make file sharing with your iPod a little harder?
If the file name is obscured, can the Gracenote database pull up the song information from a file pulled from an iPod?
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Jay said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
There hasn't been any mention yet of metadata being changed (presumably the ipod will still tell you what track is playing), so database lookups should still work. You've always been able to name you're files whatever you want. The motive here is certainly suspect, though. I'll believe it will run a little faster. Since they can guarantee unique keys, they can hash the filenames somewhere. But it doesn't seem like there will probably be enough of a boost to be worth the effort. It is, though, going to make it a lot harder to figure out what's what on the iPod. In order to figure out which song corresponds to which file, you'll have to compare the filename to the hashed track titles, wherever they're stored.
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Kevin said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
IIRC, Gracenote works by comparing the length of all the tracks on any given CD to its database. Generally, there's only one CD title that fits the times.
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Marian said 4:16AM on 9-04-2005
Gracenote has nothing to do with this.
There are 2 ways to reconstruct a good filename if you want to take the file off the iPod - reconstruct it from ID3 stored in the file or reconstruct it from the data found in iTunes database, found on the iPod.
A good program to extract mp3s out of iPod (legally - you already own the mp3s!!! it's your data, you can do whatever you want with it) is ephPod ( http://www.ephpod.com/ ). It also works with iTunes 4.7.1 database format (I assume that it wasn't changed in version 4.8).
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