How do I de-iTunes my music folder?

December 18, 2007 9:26 AM

Is there an easy way to resort my iTunes folder back into by albums, instead of by artists?

I have given up on iTunes for various reasons (firstly that it was running appallingly slow, but also that it didnt have flac support) and haven't reinstalled it since i reinstalled my OS. My iTunes folder is huge, vast, sprawling, ordered by artist/album/track (after I inadvisadly let it reorder all the music in my iTunes library) , filled with hundreds of compilation albums and mixtapes etc so this is a real problem. It would be much much easier to use other players if it was album/artist/track. Any ideas short of wasting a week of my life? I'm a XP,SP2 kind of a guy.

posted by criticalbill to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Foobar2000's masstagger/filerenamer is a thing of awesome power and beauty. As long as you didn't go with AAC, and stayed with FLAC and MP3, Foobar's got you covered.

The masstagger is POWERFUL, meaning you can hose things up completely in just a few clicks. Until you understand exactly how it works, make a backup and work on the backup. If you have enough space, make a backup, and then sort from your backup dir into another directory structure on another drive; that will give you maximum controllability.

(It's not THAT bad, but I assume that your music library is the sum of a lot of work, and you'd be really horrified if you messed it up. I am, therefore, being extra-loud about my warnings here.)
posted by Malor at 9:33 AM on December 18, 2007

google 'tag and rename' - that's the tool you want
posted by ascullion at 10:51 AM on December 18, 2007

Seconding Tag&Rename. My choice for years now.
posted by phaded at 12:06 PM on December 18, 2007

Media Center. Not free, but can tag, resort, play and stream 150K+ tracks on a 5-year-old machine without bogging down. I can't really speak for its performance on a post-2002 machine, but see no reason why it would not be acceptable.
posted by meehawl at 1:10 PM on December 18, 2007

Seconding foobar2000 as a media organizer. Have been running it for a few years now, and not had any problems, and with the right plugins, can locate any track in my library (~200GB) instantly. Moreover, it works with whatever filing system you use. You can even reorganize your files into folders using the music tags.

Also can recommend MP3Tag for tagging. It behaves similarly to foobar2000, but is only a tagger and renamer. Very well behaved, it allows you to set up naming templates which can be let loose on a directory or even an arbitrary set of files that you can drop onto it from a windows search window. I have also used this for a long time.

I have used Windows media player, and Godfather (or something like that). I did not like either of them. Winamp is better, but seems to be behave erraticly and generally is a resource hog.
posted by rasputin98 at 6:28 AM on December 20, 2007