What is the default iTune Folder Structure for iTunes 11?

Took a tiny break from my own iTunes mess and got lost in others' tales of woe ... and reading about yours woke me up from my cranky nasty stupor, made my laugh, out loud. I'm new to Mac [mere 5 frustrating years]; tho PC crashed frequently, to me it seemed transparent ...fixes were easy...frequent, but easey peasey .....and, i always new where my music was, how to find it and how to move it about. I could even burn CDs with labeled tracks. no more. those days gone. Now it's mystery meat. I almost instantly decided i did not want itunes managing things for me; but now i see that i have to give up on my isolationism and will have to check the dreaded 'keep organized' if I am to eventually have a consolidation on an external hard drive. but how to ensure those fragile links remain unbroken [not to mention retain playlists and ratings. ugggh. ] . too exhausted to piece all these threads of variously successful instructions together. just a quick thank you for your humor .... [kinda waiting for season 2 to see what happened next in your saga!]

Hi. I see the image is missing from my earlier post to this thread so here it is for reference:

And you might also find one of my make a split library portable posts useful if you want to move your library around.

tt2

Firstly, thanks for your extraordinary patience, esp with those of us who struggle with this.

Thanks so much for any help.

Second, I have a TimeMachine backup of the entire MBP and a bootable CCC backup on yet another external hard drive.

Am I correct that if I make some fatal error, I can still restore to my current state, ie, I will still have my mp3s, my playlists and ratings; or will bonds be irretrievably broken?

So here goes, bear with me; this is not my native language!

Are these goals doable or is something else a better approach:

1. to have all the bits and pieces on one external hard drive, named MacMuse [which I have just formatted for mac],

2. Retain ratings and playlists and

3 [very optional at this point] useable on a non-apple device

Currently, I use a MacBookPro [w only 16GB left], OS 10.6.8, and iTunes 10.6;

The mp3s : there are 75GB on the MBP and another 50GB in ‘storage’ [and not in use 😟 ] on several other external drives [and at one time resided on the MBP in My Music; ie I still see the exclamation marks for these mp3s in iTUnes; is that a good sign for my purposes?]

Current paths:

1. for the 75 GB of mp3s:

Users>mm>Music>My Music>Music

2. for iTunes

Users>mm>Music>iTunes>iTunesLibrary.itl

And, under iTunes/Preferences/Advanced I have:

iTunes media Folder location is

/Users/mm/Music/My Music

and both ‘Keep … organized’ and ‘Copy files..’ are checked

i'm not clear on the lingo of iTunes vs iTunes Library vs iTunes folder vs iTunes Media vs on and on...which are actual locations, which are generic terms ...It seems to make a big difference [and may be part of our collective confusions]

so,to be clear: I have:

1. for the mp3s:

Users>mm>Music>My Music>Music

2. for iTUnes

Users>mm>Music>iTunes

[sorry for the unfortunate folder label redundancies; is it possible to correct this while we are at it? ]

Here’s a Grab snapshot of the file structure, color coded! : [[ it's at the top; can't get it to move to here; hope you can see it. or tell me how better to convey]]

From what I have read, if I first get the MBP sorted out by doing a ‘drag and drop’ of the 75 GB of mp3s [ie those which reside in a separate folder outside of the iTunes folder] into the iTunes big folder, I will have no joy and so, I cannot simply drag the ‘purple’ into the ‘green’? Is that so?

So what’s the best way to bring all the pieces together, along with playlists and ratings?

At this point, time is of no essence. I'm exhausted and lack the requisite short term brain memory to not screw this up. It all sounds easy enough, but the lingo is a tad ambiguous for me. Thanks again for all your help!!! really appreciate it! mm

[ps nice to see that image you posted; reminded me of 'simpler' times w me and my WMP, when life was, seemingly,transparent!]

The library folder means the folder where the active .itl file is stored.

The media folder is the one shown under iTunes > Preferences > Advanced.

If MacMuse is a new drive then these steps should work:

1. With iTunes closed copy the entire iTunes folder from /Users/mm/Music/iTunes to /Volumes/MacMuse so it becomes /Volumes/MacMuse/iTunes
2. Press and hold down Option as you start iTunes and click on Choose, then browse to and open the file /Volumes/MacMuse/iTunes/iTunes Library.itl
3. In iTunes > Preferences > Advanced set the media folder to /Volumes/MacMuse/iTunes/iTunes Media, click OK, let iTunes consolidate the library when it asks to. Wait until all the media has been copied over.
4. Your library is now portable on the drive MacMuse.

If you want to connect the library to a Windows PC you would need to install an HFS+ driver on that, or install an NTFS driver on your Mac and copy the iTunes folder over to an NTFS formatted drive.

As to the broken links with the exclamation marks these should these go away if you launch iTunes with the relevant external drive connected. Connect each in turn, start iTunes, use File > Library > Organize Library > Consolidate Files to make copies of the tracks on that device in your new media folder. Close iTunes and connect the next device before trying to pick up the next group.

tt2

thanks much for quick response.

sorry to be so nervous about this;

i've read so much and still i do not truly comprehend enough to have figured this out for myself.

your steps look so gosh darn EASY!!!

so before i give this a shot, pls confirm

1. were you able to see my current file structure image?

2. my mp3s are in folders, all of which reside outside of current iTunes folder.

3. is it your step 3 which gets the mp3s from where they currently live on hard drive and over to the MacMuse? and they are being COPIED rather than MOVED?

4. as for the mp3s stored on various other external drives, should i first complete your steps 1-3 and spot check to be sure that i can actually play mp3s from MacMuse? and for good measure open/close iTunes, restart the MBP?

5. so my playlists and ratings will survive?

6. and when this all works and all is consolidated onto MacMuse, what do you recommend for backup? Would it work to have MacMuse connected to MBP whilst running a Time Machine or a CarbonCopyCloner backup of the MBP?

After everything i have read, i wish i could figure this out;

but i cannot, so many thanks again for your time and patience.

gosh the prospect of getting all organized again after years of chaos is so exciting! thanks.

mcm

1. No, but your description seemed clear enough.

2. Yes. This is why the steps I have suggested on this occasion rely on iTunes to consolidate the media to a brand new initially empty media folder.

3. Yes. iTunes will create copies. When you are happy the new version of the library performs as desired you can remove the originals.

4. Yes. Steps 1-3 will take care of all copying over all content currently located on the MBP. You can attempt to repair the content with broken links later, one device at at time if needs be. (I'm assuming limited numbers of free ports.)

5. Yes. Ratings, playlists, play counts, etc. all remain intact. During consolidation iTunes makes a new copy of any file currently located outside of the designated media folder, then switches the path recorded in the database to the new file location. Other data regarding the entry is unchanged and the original file is left in place.

6. Yes. As long as TM or CCC are told to include MacMuse then they should be able to backup the library to your chosen destination.

tt2

thanks for all the confirmations.

will wait til distractions here abate, later this week, before i proceed.

and report back.

thanks again, mcm

You're welcome. 🙂

tt2

Substantial success getting iTunes library onto external hard drive MacMuse!!!!! thanks tons.

During step 3, received message "Would you like iTunes to move and rename the files in your new iTunes Media folder to match the " Keep iTunes Media folder organized' preference?", and I chose 'yes' w much trepidation [at the time, i read 'move' to mean 'move to some other drive??? and duplicate 75 GB???? but now I am guessing it meant to rearrange files on MacMuse??? anyways, it worked [mehr Gluck als Verstand] ..... 45 minutes later, the 75GB was successfully on the new external hard drive Mac Muse. Thanks so so so much.

As for the 50GB of mp3s 'stored' on several other external drives, as a first step, I manually collected them onto one drive, I call Silver, into a folder named Music, with artist sub folders. [actually, it's about 71GB and about 10,000 items on Silver hard drive]

I then ejected all external hard drives, restarted MBP, reconnected both MacMuse and Silver; started iTunes, went to File/Library/Organize and selected Consolidated and OK. nothing. Repeated that process a few times, and sometimes the message of 'copying' appeared, but no results. Most often beach ball.

Then, [w both MacMuse and Silver connected], in iTunes, i clicked on a file w exclamation mark, and followed directions to manually locate that one file on Silver. sometimes I got one file with that process; and a few times I got up to one thousand. Most times, I got the beachball; had to force quit iTunes after wiating say 10 minutes. Then would eject/reconnect MacMuse and Silver, restart iTunes, try another consolidation, try another exclamation mark ...and may be get another file or two. I may have gotten 4 thousand in these ways .....is there a more efficient way to do this? there may be 5,000 left to do. thanks again for any insights. [wondered if i should manually copy the 'Music' folder from Silver HD onto the MacMuse HD,and then try to consolidate??? but as i do not really understand how itunes works, thought i would check in with you first ....concerned i may end up duplicating 10,000 files 😟

thanks so much. [back in the day, they used to say 'life is too short for enzyme purification' ... sigh....]

iTunes expects every file to stay where it was last time it accessed it. Macs can be a little more forgiving, I believe, if you move files around on the same drive although even then I'm not certain if that is always true with iTunes. When you said that you'd got content stored on other drives I was hoping that you meant that you'd managed to tell iTunes to store them there in the past. If you moved things around independently in Finder then iTunes isn't going to automatically find them. If you arrange this other content within /Volumes/MacMuse/iTunes/iTunes Media in the places it would otherwise have been then the locate trick might work. Alternatively if you can recall where things were before they were moved then that might work too. If you Get Info on a broken link, say no when asked to locate, then look at the summary tab, iTunes should list the expected location in file://localhost/... form.

If this was Windows I'd offer my scripts for reconnecting to lost tracks and deduping but I don't have Mac equivalents. 😟

tt2

actually, now there are probably only six hundred left to locate. so it's getting close to academic... but i'm still curious as to how this works... but no hurry at all. thanks abunch!

sorry, didn't see your intervening reply.

right, i moved things independently [the win pc way!!!!] to free up space ..[and can barely recall what steps i did two mins ago!!! i write notes w paper/pencil..no crashes:)]

...for five years i've assiduously de-checked 'keep...' and 'copy..' bec i could not comprehend what itunes was doing. so i did everything manually so things would stay where i put them.

last week decided I had to relinquish control to itunes for this external hard drive plan to work to free up space on MBP.

thanks again for all of your patience and curiosity, really incredible actually!

Glad to hear you're nearly there. 🙂

tt2