Itunes question

quarryman

I thought this software would be straightforward. So i install. Tell it where my music is and then it tells me it needs to copy all my music to another folder "this process cannot be reversed"

What's going on? Is it moving or copying the music?

i tried the consolidate option and that didn't seem to work either.

Basically i have all my mp3s in a folder on a partition. I want itunes to find em and allow me to arrange from there. ie, name, bitrate that kind of thing. Is this possible?

Also it doesn't seem to recognise any wmvs, is there any way around this?

TIA

bringitdown

Edit->Preferences->Advanced Tab

Set your iTunes Music Folder to the current place your MP3's are stored.

iTunes moves the music into folders in the form of Artist Folder\Album Folder if you choose to consolidate your music.

If you do not want iTunes to do this uncheck the option on the Advanced Tab.
Shutdown iTunes.
Then organize your music manually.
Then in iTunes add the relevant folder you organized to the library.

It makes no difference to how the music is presented in iTunes but does make a difference to how it is organized in your HDD.

EDIT: WMV's are not supported. WMA's will be converted to AAC or MP3 depending on your preferences.

quarryman

bringitdown wrote:

If you do not want iTunes to do this uncheck the option on the Advanced Tab.
Shutdown iTunes.
Then organize your music manually.
Then in iTunes add the relevant folder you organized to the library.

It makes no difference to how the music is presented in iTunes but does make a difference to how it is organized in your HDD.

ok i'm still hungover so having trouble understanding this.

my music is organised with each folder named as the artist. then inside are folders with each album.

iTunes moves the music into folders in the form of Artist Folder\Album Folder if you choose to consolidate your music.

right so i don't want that option.

Then in iTunes add the relevant folder you organized to the library.

so i can just add -> my music and it'll work? cool.

RicardoSmith

This is the problem with iTunes, and indeed a lot of MP3 players. They display the music as it tagged, not how you've organised it on the disk itself. Unless you tags are perfect it will generally make a mess of organising it. it will move say "the best of U2" from your U2 folder into a folder called compilations. Ditto all greatest hits. If you have say classical album which have lots of artists on the same CD, it will put them in different artists folders, not in a single ablum folder.

I have my music in folders like classical, pop, rock, blues, soundtracks etc. Itunes screws that up if I let it. One way around is to only add a folder say blues to itunes then re-tag all the tracks to the genre "blues". Do this with each genre and it seems to work better.

However when itunes rips tracks and tags them, it has a habit of screwing up the tags. You might get a 2 or 3 disc set being called two different albums with each disc being a different genre. One will be in Pop and the other in Rock etc.

If you transcode WMV's to another format they'll sound worse. Since they'll have been compressed twice.

bringitdown

quarryman wrote:

ok i'm still hungover so having trouble understanding this.

my music is organised with each folder named as the artist. then inside are folders with each album.



right so i don't want that option.



so i can just add -> my music and it'll work? cool.

Yup --> use File->Add Folder to Library

Once you have told iTunes NOT to organize music it should leave them alone and just let you play them from where they are.

quarryman

well i'd like to get those wmvs so itunes prob doesn't suit me.

is there any other good mp3 organiser around other thatn winamp?

RicardoSmith

bringitdown wrote:

Yup --> use File->Add Folder to Library

Once you have told iTunes NOT to organize music it should leave them alone and just let you play them from where they are.

True. But it displays by the tags. Since it gets tags wrong when ripping and most people don't have perfect tags, stuff can appear everywhere. MusicMatch has a feature where you can retag by folder and file name. But its still not ideal. I still prefer using file management rather than tags.

quarryman wrote:

well i'd like to get those wmvs so itunes prob doesn't suit me.

is there any other good mp3 organiser around other thatn winamp?

I've yet to find one. They all have quirks which I don't like. I switch between itunes, winamp and Windows Media player depending on my mood. Some of my firends have written their own. Something I might do myself at some point.