Hi Greg, On Dec 02, 2007, at 01:30AM, Greg Williams wrote: >Hi, >I had my itunes music folder all nice and organized into >artist:album:song hierarchy, and itunes put newly imported CDs in >that structure. Well, somehow the "organize library" preference >became unchecked, and I imported a couple of CDs whose files just got >thrown into my "itunes music" folder.
This sounds bizarre. A few quick questions: what version of iTunes are you running and are you using Tiger or Leopard on your Mac? Is your iTunes Music folder location set to your local hard drive (default is "Macintosh HD: Users: <username>: Music: iTunes: iTunes Music") or are you using an external hard drive? If you rip music from CDs, the new tracks should be organized by Artist: Album: Song -- just as you wanted -- regardless of your "organize library" preference settings. To clarify, when you say that you "imported a couple of CDs whose files just got thrown into 'your iTunes Music' folder", were these files that were already ripped from CD (such as compressed AAC or MP3 files) that you were adding to your music library, or did you insert an audio CD and import its contents? I'm going to distinguish "importing" from "adding to library" here to learn how the tagging information got added. When you rip (import) an audio CD, iTunes looks up information on the Artist, Album, and Song from the CDDB (CD database at gracenote.com) and uses that, unless you input your own edits with Get Info (Command+I). When you add a music file on your hard drive to your iTunes library, iTunes reads the tags in that file to insert the Artist, Album, and Song information into its database. And when the music you imported got "thrown into" your iTunes Music folder, how was this organized, if at all? >I went investigating why this happened and found the unchecked >organize preference. I checked, and then began my problems. When I >quit out of preferences, itunes kindly asked me if I would like my >library organized, and I blithely responded yes. When I looked at my >itunes music folder in the finder, I found that my music was now >organized in song_folder:album_folder:track_number+artist_file. This >is not at all what I wanted, but I could not find any obvious way to >undo it in itunes. The puzzling thing is that when it imports CDs, >it does it in the hierarchy I had expected. This might be mildly >annoying but amusing except that I often use VLC to play albums >because I can just navigate to the album folder in the open dialog >and play which is easier than itunes. I have tried to find scripts >online to undo this mess, but I have not had any success thus far. >Does anyone have any suggestions short of deleting all of the music >and re-importing the CDs from scratch? Thanks. >Greg > > > I have a few ideas, but await your answers. One possibility is that you simply have a corrupted preference list file. I've never been asked by iTunes whether I "would like my music organized" when I uncheck and then later check "Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized". I think that might happen if you consolidate a library that contains both items in your iTunes Music folder and files that you added that you kept outside the folder (by unchecking the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" before doing an "Add file to Library"). Could you read back the first preference settings on the General tab of the Advanced dialogue of your iTunes preferences? (Command+comma to bring up preferences, Command-6 for the Advanced menu, Item chooser to select "General, <selected> tab 1 of 3"). These will be 1) Your iTunes music folder location (you can just say default, if you haven't changed this) 2) "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" (checked or unchecked?) 3) "Copy files to iTunes Music foder when adding to library" (checked or unchecked?) And do you remember what the prefs were when you followed up on the CDs "thrown into" your music folder? That could have been because of poor tagging in the CDDB. Cheers, Esther
