My darling husband installed iTunes and allowed the software to organize our music folders. He’s been the one taking initiative in ripping our CDs to his hard drive and, unfortunately, has not cared one bit for ID3 tags. Those of you familiar with iTunes know what a disaster this is.
So, I’ve gone through and gotten the ID3 info for our files, but now don’t know how to force iTunes to reassess/reorganize our music folder.
Any advice, short of reinstalling iTunes?
Thanks!
Also, I tried searching around via Google for help on this issue; any recommendations of a good place for me to learn more about iTunes and get additional assistance (since I don’t see the problems ending neatly here ;))?
How are you planning on applying your ID3 tag info to the files? What I usually do to force an update is delete the file from iTunes, let iTunes move the files to the trash, dig the files out, apply my changes, drag them back to iTunes, wait for iTunes to copy back into its own hierarchy, and then erase the files. Not as much work as it seems, but it depends what you’re really wanting to do.
I’m using a piece of freeware for fixing the ID3 tags; I just enter the album name, and it retrieves the info. I’ve been doing it while my files are in the iTunes folder (which is where all my music is).
Also, I’m using Windows XP, so I don’t think your system will work for me. If memory serves, I can’t move things out of the trash, I can only return them to their original location. So, I couldn’t take them from the trash to a “Temp” folder, fix the tags, then move them back to iTunes. Unfortunately.
You could remove all the songs from within iTunes (making sure not to have it delete the disk file.) Then add the iTunes folder back to the Library, and it should reorganize it.
Perhaps I am stating the obvious but if you edit the tags in iTunes then iTunes will take care of everything. I am guessing that this other program somehow makes it easier to edit multiple tags.
You could edit your entire library of tags, copy the entire music folder to another temporary folder, delete the entire iTunes library (and files), then reimport the temporary folder to iTunes. Try this at your own risk of course. Make sure the option to copy files to iTunes library and keep iTunes music folder organized are checked.
I’m not sure if I understand the OP either, but if you check the “Keep iTunes Music Folder organized” option, iTunes will re-jigger your folders as you update the ID3 info in your tracks. I don’t know how exactly it works in WinXP, but on the Mac it’s easy to select a bunch of tracks, hit “Get Info,” and update as many tags as you want for all those tracks simultaneously. If you currently have a bunch of untagged mp3s, then mark one group of tracks as being by the Beatles, presto, you now have a folder called “Beatles” in your music folder.
I don’t see how dumping and reimporting your library will help you, as it will just reimport a bunch of untagged tracks.
What Anachronism and Nonsuch said – if you let iTunes keep your folders organized, you can effectively forget about them for the rest of your days.
Change the spelling of an artist’s name? iTunes will create a new folder and stick the files in there. Consolidate a bunch of tracks into a collection? iTunes will move them into the “Collections” folder according to the album name. iTunes will handle it; you have more important things to do with your time than be a file librarian.
I think the OP is using “Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized” as well as “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” in Edit->Preferences->Advanced on Windows. But she wants to use an external program to automatically apply ID3 tags, and doesn’t want to do them by hand. This is reasonable; I use Renamer4Mac and some ID3 editor whose name I can’t rememember to do this all the time on the Mac. I’ve recently started using the same two options to let iTunes handle everything, because it just got unmanageable by itself.
So…
[ul]
[li]Select the files, and hit the delete Key. You’ll be asked “Some of the selected files are located in your iTunes Music folder. Would you like to move these files to the Recycle Bin?” Answer yes.[/li][li]Create a temporary folder somewhere, like on your Desktop. Yes, you can drag things out of the Recycle Bin to whereever you want them. You don’t have to use the Restore option. Just drag 'em.[/li][li]Do whatever ID3 processing and file renaming you want. Or none – maybe you already did it in the iTunes folder hierarchy. You just want to get iTunes to recognize non-iTunes changes. So…[/li][li]Drag them back onto the iTunes window. I’d do it by album name or whatever hierarchy you have, and onto the Source pane so that everything is in a playlist that you can examine for correctness. The songs will copy back into iTunes. You can erase the playlist once you’re satisfied the information is correct. I like the playlists, because I’m assured that nothing gets lost during import.[/li][li]Once iTunes is done copying back in, just erase the files from the temporary folder.[/li][li]Step 3, profit![/li][/ul]
If your music colection is larger than what your recycle bin can hold you have a problem. In any case I feel a little nervous deleting something I want to keep. Why not just copy the iTunes music folder to a temporary folder first?
You don’t need to do any moving around or backing up of files. Just change the files in place and force iTunes to notice them (consolidate library, or just let them play), and it re-organizes them on its own. You don’t have to modify the id3 tags from within iTunes for this to work.
Note, I only tested the Windows version, and only with one file. Your data loss may vary.
Oh, yeah, I always forget about that pesky limit on Windows. I imagine on second thinking, though, that you can just delete the songs from iTunes, don’t move items to the trash but move them someplace else, and go from there as you say. On the Mac, having them move to the trash saves a step (and also because I’m not used to doing every song but rather choosing selectively from iTunes and not wanting to hunt for them in the file system).
