Hi Dane, On Sunday, September 23, 2007, at 02:45AM, "Dane Trethowan" wrote: >Ok everyone. One of my big bugbares about Itunes has been how it >creates and puts everything into a library. Well I stumbled across a >way to stop Itunes from doing this and its damn simple, just turn the >Add To Itunes Library When Importing option to off, in other words >uncheck it under the importing tab under advanced in preferences. >Itunes will keep a record of what its imported in your library only, >you get to specify the location of your import so that's damh handy, >what I'm yet to test is whether when you open a mp3 file in finder, >whether Itunes copies the opened file to its library or not.
Quick correction on this, you're talking about the General Preference tab options on the Advanced Menu pane of iTunes preferences (command+comma and then command+8 to go to Advanced; General tab is number 1 of 3 under item chooser VO-keys+i menu). There are two relevant options that can be checked, "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" and "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library". Under the Importing tab (number 2 of 3) you might be thinking of "Create file names with track number" but I think that only applies to CD ripping. You implicitly got asked about this the first time you started up iTunes. I don't remember the prompt, but it used to be something like being asked whether you wanted to let iTunes manage your music. If you allow iTunes to keep the music folder organized, it uses a structure of folders first under Artist and then by Album. If you allow it to keep music folder organized it will change track names, and artist and album names to match what you have in the tags for these fields -- but only for files that are located in the music library folder. So if you turn off the copy to iTunes music folder option before adding existing music files in another location on your disk to theiTunes library it won't change the file or folder names to match the organization. Incidentally, we have to get more specific about terminology for this discussion. I know there are two terms under the file menu option: "importing" and "adding to library". I usually think of these as adding to library means that the file is already encoded as mp3, or whatever and you only need iTunes to add its tags and properties to its database, whereas the general notion of importing, as for example from a CD, involves using a codec to create a new file -- change from an audio CD to mp3 or AAC or Apple lossless file that changes the basic format of the data as well as adding the tag information about artist, album, track names, etc. I know that's not how most people think of importing, since it can mean bringing into iTunes without re-encoding, but in the most general sense it does involve this -- that's why the "Convert to ... AAC or mp3" contextual menu options refer back to your importing preferences, If you started as mp3 and your importing preference is set to AAC files, using this menu option re-encodes the file creating a completely new file. These settings are almost always the gotcha for Windows users who have files played and organized from other applications. This is why the setting of "copy files" when adding to library is there -- so it doesn't mess up the original. Cheers, Esther
