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.

I just posted version 0.6.1 to the Downloads page. It’s just a bug-fix release; no new features. It addresses the following issues:

• The dock icon is now always reset to its normal state when the application quits
• Lostify no longer complains when processing files that already contain embedded lyrics
• The timeout value for making backup copies was increased from 1 minute to 5 minutes
• If you change the file kind between Movie, TV Show and/or Music Video while running from within iTunes, Lostify now instructs iTunes to re-categorize the file appropriately

Thanks to everyone for reporting these!

Several folks have commented about Lostify’s unfortunate propensity for making copies of the video files you try to tag, especially when tagging files inside of iTunes. When you’re dealing with large files, sometimes over 1GB each, this can really take some time (not to mention disk space). And unfortunately, this is kind of a technical problem. Nevertheless, I’ll explain it here. Maybe the ensuing discussion will give rise to a better solution.

What you’re seeing here is a confluence of several factors:

1. Lostify tries to play things safe: because AtomicParsley (the command-line utility Lostify uses to actually modify MP4 files, hereinafter referred to as AP) is still in beta testing, Lostify doesn’t necessarily trust that it will not produce a corrupt video file. Such corruptions are rare, but they have been known to happen. To avoid this, Lostify has several different means of providing safety: it can (a) instruct AP to produce a separate tagged copy of the file, leaving the original alone; (b) instruct AP produce a separate tagged copy, then (if it appears to have been successful) trash the original and rename the copy same as the original; or (c) make a backup copy of the original, then instruct AP to overwrite the original file with a tagged version, and (if successful) trash the backup. Or there’s choice (d), which is to throw caution to the wind and just instruct AP to overwrite the original.
2. Options (a) and (b) above are straightforward — as far as AtomicParsley is concerned, the output is a new file. But whenever you tell AP to overwrite the original file [see options (c) and (d) above], two different things can happen. In a few cases, the existing metadata/tags are “just right,” and the file can be overwritten in place. But in most cases, AP must rewrite the entire contents of the file into a temporary file in the same directory as the original, and then it replaces the original with this temp file.
3. iTunes uses aliases rather than simple file paths to keep tabs on its tracks. This means that if you take a file in iTunes (while iTunes is running), move it to the trash, and replace it with a newly-tagged version in the same location and with the same name as the original… iTunes still goes ahead happily referring to the one in the trash. You have to quit iTunes and restart it before it will recognize the new file. (If anybody knows some clean and reliable ways around this, I’m all ears.)

As a consequence of #3, Lostify works differently when you are tagging files from within iTunes. If you have normally selected methods (a) or (b) for safety, Lostify substitutes method (c). This explains the extra copy operation you see — in fact much of the time, first Lostify makes its backup copy, then AtomicParsley makes another whole tagged copy as it works, then AP replaces the original with its tagged copy, then (assuming the new copy looks good) Lostify trashes its backup. Yeah, I know it’s wasteful, but at least it’s safe.

There are some cases when you might not care so much about the safety aspects. One would be if you already have the videos backed up somewhere — either in the same format, or (if you don’t mind transcoding again, in the rare case of corruption) in a different or original format. In cases like this, you’re much better off just choosing option (d), which will operate as fast as possible and won’t leave anything filling up your trash can.

Another case where you might consider “safely” choosing option (d) is if all your MP4 files come from a particular version of a particular encoder, and Lostify has already proven itself in producing reliable results with those files. For example, if you always encode your MP4s using QuickTime, and they always go through Lostify correctly, then you can be fairly certain that other MP4s encoded with the same version of QuickTime will also encode correctly. But if you update to a new version of QuickTime, you’d be wise to temporarily switch back to a safer method for Lostify to produce its output, until you’ve verified that things still work smoothly. The same goes for ffmpeg, iSquint, VisualHub, or whatever you use to encode your MP4 files.

Having said all that, I’m certain there’s a better way to be doing this. Maybe there’s a way for Lostify to tell iTunes (via AppleScript) that it should not worry about the old copy in the trash, but to look at the path instead to get the new version. Maybe I can work with the AtomicParsley folks to get it to be more “careful”, so the odds of overwriting a good original with a corrupt tagged version are drastically reduced (or eliminated). Or maybe someone reading this will have another bright idea to solve these troubles. I’d love to hear your comments.

Lostify 0.6 is now available from the Downloads page. It is the first release to feature iTunes integration and support for some international movie & TV ratings. Keep reading for a full description of all the new features and changes…

This version has taken me a lot longer than I had anticipated, both because some of the work just took longer than I thought, and because I had quite a number of personal challenges that severely limited the time I could spend on the project. However, I am very happy to report that development of 0.6 has wrapped up. Here (in brief) are the changes that were made:

• Added option to back up original file before overwriting
• Added option to automatically add tagged tracks to iTunes
• Added option to invoke Lostify from iTunes Script menu
• Automatically add the “i” button in iTunes for pop-up descriptions
• Added support for movie and TV ratings from those countries supported by iTunes (AU, CA, IE, NZ, UK, US)
• Added support for ratings annotations, i.e. often the rationale behind the rating
• Streamlined popup alerts; show application status through badges on the dock icon rather than alert boxes
• Added additional error checking to detect when tagging may have gone wrong
• Improved and corrected parsing of existing metadata
• Incorporated new build of AtomicParsley with improved support for Apple TV compatible movies

Please download it and take it for a spin… I hope it works for you!