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Force file name change in Music

Hi, so long ago I resisted the way iTunes auto-organized the library, because I had my own system, but I've long since accepted it and now it has the run of my media library.


I recently got a new computer and was able to update, and now use Music as opposed to iTunes. However, when I'm adding music to my library (off a CD, say, or from another source besides Apple's store), when it organizes them, it now only changes the file names for some of the songs. (It seems like if I need to go in an edit the tags to change the title, like say if it had a (feat.) in the title and I moved that to the artist tag, then it will update it, but for others it won't.) Is there a way to force Music to look at the songs and change the files names to match the standard for the rest?

Mac mini, macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 16, 2020 3:26 PM

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Posted on Oct 18, 2020 11:38 AM

Try Repair security permissions for iTunes for Mac - Apple Community and then the trick with Keep Organized again. Typically the media folder in Catalina will either be the old iTunes media folder from before an upgrade to Catalina ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media, or default for Music which is ~/Music/Music/Media so yours does appear to be in a non-standard layout.


tt2

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 18, 2020 11:38 AM in response to jacehan

Try Repair security permissions for iTunes for Mac - Apple Community and then the trick with Keep Organized again. Typically the media folder in Catalina will either be the old iTunes media folder from before an upgrade to Catalina ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media, or default for Music which is ~/Music/Music/Media so yours does appear to be in a non-standard layout.


tt2

Oct 18, 2020 8:02 AM in response to turingtest2

The path under the preferences is [hard drive name]/Users/[my name]/Music, same as it's always been. In this example that I showed, the different songs all have the same artist/album artist, album, same everything except for title and track no. (So there, Astronaut is track 1 and has been renamed, but Runs in the Family is track 2 and has not.) They are currently in the same folder, inside the music folder.

Oct 20, 2020 2:06 PM in response to turingtest2

Yeah. It's checked and turning it off/on doesn't update. It does scan the library and it seems like it's specifically scanning the new songs, but it doesn't edit the file names. Right now if I edit the tags and add a space to the end of the title, it'll register that change and update the filename. But changing any other tag doesn't do that, and I don't want to have to do that for every track. (If changing any tag worked I could at least do the whole album at once, even if it is a pain.)

Oct 21, 2020 4:27 AM in response to jacehan

How frustrating! Probably not the issue given your example with missing track numbers above, but I recall that iTunes may not do case-only corrections, e.g. not changing The beatles to The Beatles at the file/folder level after an edit. I assume this is because it used a case-insensitive comparison to decide if anything needed to be changed. Perhaps such code has also made it to Music.


tt2

Force file name change in Music

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