ITunes music library in a bit of A MUDDLE.

I have a new windows computer with ITunes installed. By default my music is being saved in ITunes/Media/Music. I wanted this redirected to an external hard drive. Which I have done. I have named this folder as 'My Music' but I have noticed that though there are loads of separate artists with their albums in 'My Music' I have another folder called 'Music' which is a subfolder of 'My Music' and this is about 80GB and contains loads of artists and their music. I'm not sure if this is a legacy folder but the artists and their music are required and appears to work safely with ITunes. My question is 'Can I move these individual artists and their music out of this subfolder and place it higher up (within) the main folder called 'My Music'?' I would assume this will flag up any duplicate entries? And I will remain with a single folder called 'My Music' on my external hard drive? I don't want to corrupt anything. Thanks in advance for any assistance offered. JD

Windows, Windows 10

Posted on Mar 3, 2025 2:09 PM

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Mar 3, 2025 3:34 PM in response to jdoherty76

First order of business, don't move files around by hand. iTunes will lose track of renamed/relocated files. The default name for the iTunes media folder is iTunes Media. The default layout of the media folder since iTunes 9 has been to put each media type in its own dedicated subfolder inside the media folder, so what you are seeing is normal. See Make a split library portable - Apple Community for some more background. If you really want to pop the artist folders up a level you can edit the hidden .iTunes Preferences.plist file and change the layout value from 1 to 0 then turn Keep organized... off and back on again to have iTunes restructure things.


Should you have duplicates see Duplicate songs in iTunes - Apple Community.


tt2

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ITunes music library in a bit of A MUDDLE.

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