Renaming iTunes music folders - will it confuse iTunes?

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Level 1

75 points

Renaming iTunes music folders - will it confuse iTunes?

I've imported from CDs, downloaded music, etc from a variety of sources. I now have over 22000 songs. When I go to my iTunes folders i see that there are sometimes various spellings of the same artist; Sonny and Cher, Sonny & Cher, or K-Fed and K Fed etc.
I would like to combine all of the albums by that artist together. Can I just drag the albums out of one folder and in to the other or will this confuse iTunes?
Alternately, can I "rename" an artist's folder to reflect the correct spelling?
What happens to the albums inside if I have 2 folders with the same name? Will it even let me do this?
Will Itunes then say "original song could not be found" or something similar?

I would prefer to work in the windows file structure view as opposed to changing the names in iTunes since it's easier to see all my folders this way.

Windows Laptop, Windows XP

Posted on May 15, 2010 10:19 AM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

272,719 points

May 15, 2010 11:44 AM in response to Cacher123

If you move things around in Explorer iTunes will lose track of them...

By far the easiest things to do is to enable the iTunes preference to *Keep the iTunes Media folder organised* and then use Get Info. in iTunes to make changes where required. iTunes will start to make more sense as you settle on, for example, a consistent spelling for each artist or band, and in the background your folders will, in general, tidy themselves up.

For tips on organising the library for best advantage see http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/grouping.asp - I've also written a script there that can clean up any orphaned artwork/folders that may be left behind when iTunes or other media apps reorganise things.

If you're really particular about how things are ordered at the file & folder level (and despite myself I happen to fall into that category) then you can move things around and reconnected them one at a time by using the "File can't be found dialog" that appears if you try to play or get info for a moved file, or you can delete & reimport the tracks, however this will lose ratings, play counts and other volatile meta data.

If you absolutely must impose your own file & folder name structure then this is still best achieved via iTunes with the help of scripts. It is still a work in progress, but I have a script which will take my naming rules and apply them to a selection of exisitng files, moving them to their new locations and automatically reconnecting iTunes to the correct file. I haven't yet got it to the stage where it includes the code to relocate artwork and tidy emtied folders as it goes, nor is there an easy way to express different naming stategies within the script which is why I've yet to put it up publicly but if you're interested I could post a link...

tt2

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