Organizing/Renaming Files In itunes

The first thing to do before importing any more media is to go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced and turn off the options to Keep iTunes Media folder organized and Copy files to the iTunes Media folder when adding to library.

ITunes doesn't care about the physical layout of the files, it just reads the tags. If you have meaningful information encoded in the file path it is possible to extract it and supply it to iTunes. If your files were laid out in conventional form ..\Artist\Album\## Name then my script TagFromFilename would do the trick but I'm guessing things aren't so easy.

tt2

I have a suggestion. Don't change the song names.

Since that appears to be causing the issue, it begs the question about how useful it is to rename everything. So my question is; exactly how useful is it to have a different name for a song or album to the one the artist gave it?

Of course, it's your choice, but ...

Do you have a script that renames the file as per the artist and song name in itunes?

e.g. in iTunes I have a song called "Go" by the Artist "Moby" but the file is called 123abcd.mp3

I would like a script that would take the info from iTunes Artist and name to rename the file to "Moby_Go.mp3"

Is there anything like this for windows? I used to have it on my old mac which broke 😟

If you let iTunes consolidate and organize the files, which is the easiest way, then it would end up as <Media Folder>\Music\Moby\Moby\03 Go.mp3.

Or you could use the Auto-Organize Files... feature in MediaMonkey before you add things to iTunes if you have a specific layout in mind.

Or you could take my ConsolidateByMoving script and adjust it for your needs.

I'd recommend the first option though in practice I use a custom version of the last. This means I sometimes spend more time managing the library than listening to it which isn't to be recommended. If your files are tagged and accessed via a library then the filenames themselves are pretty much irrelevant.

tt2