About Lostify

What is it?

Lostify is a metadata tagger for MP4 videos. It runs on Mac OS X, and the tags it produces aim to be compatible with iTunes, the iPod, iPhone, Front Row and Apple TV. This means that after you tag a video using Lostify, it will show up in iTunes, iPod etc. appropriately as a TV Show, Music Video, etc., with all the episode information, season information, etc. intact.screen shot

The Name

Lost is my favorite TV Series. (In fact, it’s about the only TV Series I watch regularly.) I was annoyed that when I ripped season 1 off DVD, they went into iTunes, but they weren’t categorized with the season 2 episodes I had bought on iTunes. Hence I wrote this to “lostify” my ripped episodes.

Features

Here is a list of the metadata that Lostify can embed, read and modify in MPEG4 files. Fields listed like this are displayed by iTunes, but iTunes limits your ability to modify the field. Fields listed like this are displayed by iTunes under some circumstances, but cannot be edited at all from within iTunes. Additionally, Lostify supports embedding all these fields directly into MPEG4 files, while iTunes (at least through version 7) typically only lets you modify its internal database; iTunes (presumably for performance reasons) does not write tags back out to your MP4 files.

  • Name (Episode Title)
  • Album
  • Artist
  • Album Artist
  • Track and Track Count
  • Disc and Disc Count
  • Genre
  • Comments
  • Episode Number
  • Episode ID
  • Show (Series)
  • Season (number)
  • Release Date (either a year or a full date)
  • File Kind (Movie, TV Show, etc.)
  • Description
  • Network
  • Copyright
  • Encoding Tool
  • Rating (from Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK & US)
  • Rating Annotation (the rationale behind the rating)
  • Content Advisory (I’m not sure if Lostify support for this is complete or not.)
  • Cast and Crew Listing (NEW)

Usage

Drag one or more M4V or MP4 files onto the Lostify icon. For each file you drop on the icon, Lostify will display a window showing the metadata currently embedded in the file, and will allow you to modify it.A great Lostify feature is field locking. This was in response to requests for batch-style editing. Basically, it allows you to “lock” certain fields, and the values in those fields will be applied to all videos you run through Lostify until you decide to unlock them. If a locked field is going to overwrite metadata that is already in the video, Lostify will warn you by turning the lock icon red. In this case, the data which will be overwritten can be viewed in a tool tip. I’m very interested in anybody’s feedback on this feature.You can choose 4 means of determining the newly tagged file’s name. These options are available in the Options drawer:

  1. You can cause the original file to be placed in Finder’s Trash can, and the new tagged file can be put in the original location with the same filename as the original. If there is anything wrong with the tagged file, you can retrieve the original from the trash.
  2. You can cause a backup to be made of the original file before it is modified, and then overwrite the original with the tagged version. This has the distinct benefit of allowing apps that maintain aliases to the original files (such as iTunes) to find the newly tagged version instead of “following” the original version to the trash. After successful tagging, the backup copy is placed in the trash instead.
  3. You can overwrite the original file with the new tagged version. This is dangerous, because the original is lost. Since this is beta software, DO NOT DO THIS unless you have a backup of your original files. However it is sometimes desirable, for example if the file is already in iTunes.
  4. You can cause a new “lostified” file to be created with a suffix appended on the original name. This is the default behavior; the suggested suffix is “-tagged”, but you are free to change it.

Lostify can take its sweet time for videos that are several hundred megabytes or more. You have to be patient, because it has to rewrite the entire file (unless you live dangerously and choose to overwrite the original file). At this time there is no progress bar, but the dock icon does change to indicate when the program is busy or finished.

iTunes Integration

Lostify 0.6 introduced 2-way iTunes integration. First, any files that are run through Lostify can automatically be added to iTunes when Lostify is done. Files containing a description that are thus added to iTunes automatically acquire the little “i” button to show the description in a pop-up window.Second, Lostify can install a “helper” AppleScript into iTunes, which will let you invoke Lostify on one or more tracks directly from within iTunes. When you do this, Lostify keeps track of the iTunes track while it updates the metadata, and updates the iTunes database when it’s finished. (This also has the effect of adding the “i” button to existing videos with descriptions.) Note, however: when Lostify is invoked from iTunes, the file output mode will always be either “overwrite original” (if that is selected in Options) or “Backup, then overwrite” (if anything else is selected). The other two methods of naming destination files (Trash Original or New File) do not work well with files that are already in iTunes.NOTE ON iTUNES INTEGRATION: Lostify lets you modify metadata fields that iTunes otherwise does not let users access–such as TV and Movie ratings, cast/crew listings, content advisory, encoding tool, network, and copyright notice. If you set any of these fields and later decide you want to clear them out (so they are no longer set)… Lostify will remove the metadata from the file on disk, but iTunes does not refresh properly and remove these items from its database. In these situations, the only known solution is to remove the file from iTunes and re-add it, at which time those metadata fields will no longer be set.

Status

Lostify is still beta software. If you enable the option to overwrite your original files, you should by all means have a backup of those files before clicking the Apply button.

Future Plans

Here are the features I or others have thought of, and may get around to implementing when I have time or motivation.

  • Embedding of cover art
  • Cleaner user interface
  • More powerful batch-tagging features
  • Add a full-fledged progress bar, rather than just a spinner
  • Add support for a wider variety of non-video tags: podcast flag, podcast category, podcast keyword
  • Streamline support for other video kinds besides just TV Shows

If you are interested in these or other features, please don’t hesitate to email me. I reserve the right to prioritize what I will implement and when, but user feedback makes a big difference to me. Of course I’m also very interested in feedback on existing features.License:I am currently making Lostify available as freeware. This means you don’t have to pay anything for it, although if it works for you I would appreciate an email. As ongoing development of Lostify requires a fair amount of my time, I also welcome contributions/donations to fund its development. Please consider contributing; you can do so via the PayPal link at the right.NOTE:Lostify includes and makes use of the excellent AtomicParsley, a command-line tool for reading and writing iTunes metadata in MP4 files. Atomic Parsley is released under the GPL, and binary and source code releases are available at atomicparsley.sourceforge.net.