iTunes organization fiasco

April 27, 2013 10:27 PM

What am I doing wrong? iTunes is moving my music folders around causing havoc.

iTunes lost its ability to find my music on an external drive. To fix this I specified the drive and folder location and had it re-find the music files. Then there were two copies of every file in the iTunes library. To solve that problem I deleted the entire library and then re-added all the music again. However I then noticed that for some reason iTunes had moved all the individual artist folders out of F: "my music", and place them in F:"hundreds of folders" which were then very inconveniently mixed in with every other file in that drive. The F:"my music" folder now just holds playlists.

I created another separate music folder, put actual music files in it, and I will need to let iTunes find them again. But I haven't done so yet, because I want to make sure they stay in the specified folder the next time I add them.

I guess I'm just asking for suggestions to make the process easier.

This is in Windows 8.

posted by Mrs. Buck Turgidson to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Best answer: It sounds like you have the default settings of "let iTunes organize my music" and "copy files to iTunes folder" selected. Gotta turn those off if you want to make it not do things like this.
posted by thelonius at 10:38 PM on April 27, 2013

thelonius seems to have it. You may want to consider using another media manager if it is important to you to keep your own folder structure. In my experience, iTunes on Windows works better when you let it manage the music folder.
posted by bardophile at 12:09 AM on April 28, 2013

What am I doing wrong?

Using iTunes. Try foobar2000 instead.
posted by flabdablet at 2:18 AM on April 28, 2013 [3 favorites]

flabdablet has it right. Foobar is fast, flexible and lightweight.
posted by quidividi at 5:46 AM on April 28, 2013

I have used my own folder structure with iTunes for years with very few problems. The secret is, as thelonius says, to not let it organize your music.
posted by soelo at 10:04 AM on April 30, 2013

It seems backwards, but for future reference; when you're doing this you want to tell iTunes where the new location is, then ask it to consolidate everything there. I.e. let iTunes move/copy the files. As opposed to moving the directory in the OS and then asking iTunes to "find" the new one. This will keep your library metadata in sync.

More information here.
posted by churl at 3:49 PM on May 5, 2013