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Level 1

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iTunes & Music Folders Confusion

My Music folder seems to be set up in a very confusing way and I was wondering if anyone could explain how to get it back to how it should be. I have bought songs from both iTunes and Anazon and have also copied my CDs to iTunes. I'm not sure if the following mess is my fault, but I would like to get everything to a simple structure. Ideally all songs should be in the music folder. This is what it's like at the moment...

Music folder has sub-folders of Amazon, iTunes and Music (and 3 desktop.ini files - do I need all of these? what are they for?)
Amazon folder has 4 folders of songs I have bought (seems as it should be)
iTunes folder has folders for Album Artwork (is this just for iTunes?), iTunes Media, iTunes Music and Previous iTunes Libraries
Music folder has Amazon folder (which has 3 or the 4 songs mentioned above)

So back to the iTunes folder above...
iTunes Media has has a folder called Music and in this Music folder are some of my albums
iTunes Music has some of my albums as well.

So why are my iTunes albums saved in different folders and why are my Amazon albums partly duplicated in different folders?

And how can I get all this lot into just one folder or into some better order?

I'm very confused.

Windows Vista

Posted on Aug 24, 2010 3:05 AM

18 replies

Katrina S.

Level 7

24,131 points

Aug 27, 2010 7:14 AM in response to peeneng

Have you tried the itunes menu > File > Library > Organize library and checked off the option to upgrade to itunes media organization?
Or is it grayed out?

Aug 27, 2010 2:41 PM in response to Katrina S.

Hah, I just tried that and it worked! Admittedly it didn't stick it into the iTunes media folder, but that won't take 10 mins to sort. 😀

Sep 4, 2010 2:26 PM in response to turingtest2

Thought I'd drag this one up, as there might be some useful information here.

I had to completely re-install my OS as I'd managed to receive one of those stupid virus checkers that hold your computer to ransom.

Aaaanyway, I re-installed iTunes once everything was ready, but I had changed the name of my computer since the last install. I remembered from a previous time that if you change computer names and try to use an old iTunes backup, it doesn't work. So I loaded the iTunes library XML file into a text editor and got it to replace all the instances of the old computer name with the new one. Fair enough.

Then I proceeded to copy the backup back to it's correct location, but it still didn't work, by now I was starting to panic as I really didn't want to lose playcounts and stuff.

So then I turned off the feature to let iTunes sort out music in the library, wiped the library, then proceeded to copy again. Another fail, by this time I was having kittens.

So I wiped the library AGAIN then re-copied over my backup library. This is where TT2 comes in. I booted up iTunes but it still wasn't finding the music, so I thought i'd check where it was expecting to find the media, and lo, it was in the friggin' iTunes media folder. After all the previous messing it was basically down to iTunes not resetting certain settings in the registry when it re-installed. So after moving all the media into the media folder and everything worked!

As a warning to anyone upgrading iTunes to rid it of old bugs: IT WILL NOT WORK!

You MUST completely rid the computer of any traces of iTunes before you proceed to install any new versions of it. Since I've re-installed my OS there have been no problems of any sort in iTunes, so I think this can safely back up this theory. I'm not saying you have to re-install your OS to install iTunes, only to wipe 100% of iTunes before you install it again.

iTunes & Music Folders Confusion