Can I force iTunes to let me use my own folder structure?

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Can I force iTunes to let me use my own folder structure?

This question was asked in 2015 by someone else and Limnos seemed to give the most helpful response but I am still left with questions.

The original question (modified) was:

I have a big music library.... My music is organized the way I like to find music by folders that reflect my own taste. I'd like simply to see my music in my folders.

My addition: I have hundreds of CDs I have downloaded into my iTunes in the past and added to. I recently realized not everything was switching over to my iPod (which I use as my mobile jukebox). It would play in iTunes but not sync over to my iPod. I could NOT find the answer as to why so I thought maybe it was a file storage location issue. I spent several days organizing the files into folders that make sense to me and which mirror the folders and playlists I had set up in iTunes. Then I copied everything into C:\My Music\iTunes Media\Music. In other words, within that location, I now have folders (such as genres of music) in which there are folders (such as artists) which contain the music files. I initially created all of this in a different location on my C drive and then copied everything over to the iTunes Media location. Now iTunes can't find my music at all.

** I HAVE changed the folder location lookup under the Advanced tab (Edit > Preferences > Advanced) and I HAVE unchecked both the "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" and also "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library." but iTunes still cannot seem to find the files with the subfolders in the "iTunes Media\Music" location. I've Googled the snot out of this issue. If I REdrag files into playlists on iTunes, iTunes can find and play them, but then it starts organizing them its own way again, which was the mess I spent days cleaning up!

Can someone help? This is exasperating. If I have to drag every CD into my playlists again, one-by-one, that will take me several days... and if it's only to have it get organized in iTunes' way (which is to put songs into several different folders in some cases or lump them in "Compilations", etc. etc.), then I feel like giving up and will declare iTunes straight up stupid.

Windows, Windows 10

Posted on Jan 13, 2023 5:04 PM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

278,319 points

Jan 13, 2023 6:07 PM in response to OldDogWillingToLearnNewTricks

If you have the Keep... and Copy... options turned off then when you add something to iTunes it will stay where you've put it, and iTunes will work just fine. However if you move anything iTunes won't know where to find it. And anything that iTunes downloads, rips, or converts will still go into its normal <Media Folder>\Music\<Artist>\<Album>\## <Name>.<Ext> layout. For a long time I would manually move and rename things to my preferences and then either fix the links I'd broken or remove and then reimport the content. Eventually I wrote a script which is a variant of one called CustomRenamer that has all my own preferences baked into it, so that whatever tracks I have selected get automatically renamed as I want them. In my case it follows Apple's general layout, but has better character substitution and removes the 40 character limit for file and folder names that Apple impose.

tt2

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

278,319 points

Jan 25, 2023 1:46 PM in response to OldDogWillingToLearnNewTricks

I wrote CustomRenamer (or at least my even more customised version of it) to move tracks to the paths I wanted, and then fix the links that would otherwise be broken in iTunes. This was after quite a long time of moving things manually, or with MediaMonkey, and then either repairing links one by one in iTunes, or removing the tracks and then adding back from the new location.

If content in your library is broken now you can try my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes. See this post for an explanation of how it works. It might need some tweaking if your media is in a non-standard layout but may cope with a shallower folder structure than the one that iTunes generates.

tt2

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Answer 3

Jan 25, 2023 1:33 PM in response to turingtest2

@TT2, thanks for that. I still have questions but maybe the easiest one to verbalize that might answer the others is how did you fix the broken links? When I download a new CD, it goes to C:\My Music\iTunes Media\Music\xxx (the "xxx" being an artist or other randomly organized and named folder that iTunes created when it downloaded my CD). How do I get iTunes to recognize MY named folders at the "xxx" point in the "address" instead of the ones they created? Am I going to have to go CD by CD in my library and SPECIFICALLY change the "where to locate" address? I was really hoping I could leave it at C:\My Music\iTunes Media\Music and it would look in the Music folder (or rather, the folders within the Music folder) for the track I'm telling it to play. I guess I was thinking it was like searching in a program where you can put an * when you may not have the exact term to search but the computer finds everything close to it? Am I making sense?

The more I try to fix this, the more I feel like I'm confusing myself.

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Can I force iTunes to let me use my own folder structure?

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