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
