why has itunes moved my music files out of the Music folder?

Sorry TT2, but after rearranging the files and folders, iTunes still keeps creating folders in the wrong places.

Grrr...

What is it doing now?

tt2

Grrr, is right. But take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

I posted that only as a FYI. I just move them to where they belong. I might be doing a clean install of 10.9 in a bit and hopefully that will get the little gremlin out of my system.

When I import a audiobook from disc, it creates (Author)/ (Book)/ (book part) out of place. Remember that imported audobooks are first categorized as Music, and the user has to change that to Audiobook.

I have moved the last batch, and I don't remember if it is even with iTunes Media or even with Music, but definately not inside Music.

I will update you as I figure out more.

Under File > Library > Organize Library... is the box "Rearrange..." greyed out?

What is the path to the media folder listed under iTunes > Preferences > Advanced?

What is the path created that you think is wrong?

Sometime iTunes will create folders for content at a higher level that expected because it doesn't have permissions to create a new folder in the proper location. I don't have too much hands on experince with iTunes on Macs but on PCs it seems to use either the SYSTEM or current USER accounts for various IO tasks. Both should have full access rights for iTunes to function normally. Incorrect permissions may often arise when the library is moved from one system to another.

iTunes uses the following structure for audiobooks:

<Media Folder>/Audiobooks/<Author>/[[D-[## ]]<Name>.<Ext>

I.e. optional leading disc and track numbers, will all books, chapters, parts etc. by an author in a single flat folder.

tt2

TT2,

I appreciate your input, but my intent was to tell you that on the Mac side, iTunes does not always behave as you have said. I was not specifically looking for a solution this time. I did not realize your iTunes experience was on the PC side. They do have their differences.

Let me start off by saying, I won't be making any changes while I am trying out 10.9 on an external drive, and have 10.7.5 on the Mac HD. Everytime I switch between them, it seems to want to reorganize the library and change the path.

I have lived with this problem for years, and have resigned myself to having to manually organize the library. With iTunes 11.1, I spent hours on the phone with several Senior Apple Advisors working on a sync issue, and we have reviewed my iTunes set up in minute detail, with me beating them to the punch on issue/ cause/ solution time and again.

We have gone over Organize and Rearrange in the past. iTunes has churned the library time and time again, and keeps turning on "Keep iTunes Media folder organized".

I said nothing recently about a wrong path, but since I keep my library on a external Drobo, so the path I want in iTunes > Preferences > Advanced is /Volumes/Doc/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media and not /Users/brent/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media.

I have also seen this to some extent with music, also. When I manually organized it, I had music both inside and outside of where it should have been, with a few artist having folders in both.

I recently decided to turn off Keep Organized, since it have never worked for me.

If iTunes can not access the Drobo, it will switch the path to on the Mac HD. iTunes 11.1.2, in OS X 10.7.5, has doing a much better job of not doing this, until I started testing and booting from an external HD with 10.9. It has been changing the path and turning on Keep Organized.

I have not wanted my iTunes library on my Mac hard drive since about 2006. It had been external to the Mac HD, either on an internal RAID or external Drobo. I have been fighting the issues of having a remote library for years. Added with the occasional lose of content from iTunes. I have about 113 GB of audiobooks and only about 18 GB of music. I have taken to keeping the audiobooks below Music, and even with iTunes. And most of the time iTunes finds them without a problem.

I used your Music vs Media chart to manually organize it. And the first audiobook that I imported was put in the wrong place.

I have never seen the sturcture you show above include the [[D-[## ]]<Name>.<Ext> portion. On a Mac it has been <Media Folder>/Audiobooks/<Author>/(Title)/ (possibly book part name). Remember that importing from audio disc will always put it into Music and you have to Get Info and change the media to Audiobook. For 90% of audiobooks imported from disc, putting them all in a single flat folder (I understand that to mean a single hierarchical level folder.) will horribly put them out of order. Since it seems the publishers purposely title the small segments so they will not play in order if imported into a single folder.

For now, I am going to put this issue on hold, and test 10.9 and other issues.

Thank you for your input, it is appreciated.

As, sounds like you have, the infamous "if the external/network drive is disconnected/offline then the media folder path resets" problem. No real fixes for that I'm afraid if you're using network storage. With an local internal/external drive drive putting the library into a portable layout (iTunes folder containing iTunes Media folder) sorts that out, but with a network drive you're likely to get a big performance hit which makes it impractical.

The status of Keep... & Copy... and the media folder are stored in a preference file somewhere. From memory a problem that causes the media folder to be reset to the internal drive (actually I suspect to an iTunes Media folder inside whichever folder has the active library) shouldn't reset the Keep... & Copy... options, however those options need to be manually changed (if not using the default values) when moving a library to a new system. Occasionally iTunes updates have been know to "reset" the default values too. 😟

The default layout iTunes uses for audiobooks in the new scheme (I might have to double check the old layout) is a single flat folder, per author, which is not ideal if you have multi-part books. iTunes sorts the parts internally by track Name rather than album, disc & track number which is why certain naming schemes put the parts out of order. I suspect you'll be best keeping to treating them as music, but if you like see my tips for Audiobooks on iPods anyway. I have a Windows-only script for setting Sort Name values to fix the ordering issue, but merging books into a single chapterized audiobook seemed to be the way to go until recently. Now that iTunes seems to no longer support chapters there is perhaps less point to it. 😟

tt2

TT2, you're "preaching to the chior", or are you advising others?

I've know about external/network drive issues for years, and have known how to deal with them. There is no noticable performance hit, and iTunes is now doing a lot better on waking the external drive, beginning about iTunes 11.0.

The Keep... & Copy... options only need to be addressed when moving the library, not pointing to an existing library.

iTunes is not using that layout, Out of about 700 audiobooks in my library, I have probably less than a hundred one-part books. And I don't treat them as music, and once they are in iTunes, I change it to Media Kind Audiobook, gapless and do not shuffle. They are handled better as audiobooks than music.

And as I said, when I discussed this recently with Apple Senior Advisors, I beat them to the punch on each and every item above. Like I said before, I have had my iTunes library remote to the Mac HD since 2006. I have been using iTunes since about 2001.

The only thing I was looking from you was the file structure or layout, and if I was missing anything to keep it organized.

Brent

MacinNW_Brent wrote:

TT2, you're "preaching to the chior", or are you advising others?

Probably a bit of both. I don't always work out which bits of the picture others already have, and these kinds of threads may yet prove useful later to new users with similiar problems. 🙂

tt2

I am now experiencing the same issue with my iTunes library - it is stored on a NAS device.

It had been working fine for months (since I moved to the NAS), but suddenly started moving music out to the iTunes Media folder instead of the Music sub folder and I am unable to successfully run a consolidate / organize on the library - iTunes keeps crashing.

Thoughts?

Try this.

http://www.zdnet.com/mavericks-smb2-problem-and-fixes-7000022519/

Is working for me... cross fingers

This doesn't seem to be the case with iTunes 11 on Mac (in my case).

Previously iTunes placed imported music in individual artist folders under <itunes media folder>/Music/<some artists>.

Now it places the artists folders directly in the root of the media folder <itunes media folder>/<some artists>. So, applications, podcast folders etc are now siblings individual artists. I swtiched organise folders back on (after tempriarily swtiching it off so I could import songs from the Music folder without having them moved out to the root), but it promptly started copying all artists to the root of the media folder. Something has changed in iTunes.

My iTunes media folder is on a network drive, but my media folder path is local and hasn't changed in a long time:

"/Volumes/media/iTunes"

It's really silly, because any itunes folder structure will be lost in a sea of artists folders. It looks like other media (applications) are still going into their respective subfolders.

Something has probably trashed <Media Folder>/.iTunes Preferences.plist as you are describing the pre-iTunes 9 layout of the media folder. Use File > Library > Organize Library... > Rearrange files in the folder "<Media Folder>" to impose the correct layout.

tt2

Thanks for the tip.

The file in the media folder had layout version=0. My local iTunes library media folder (that it falls back to if the samba drive drops out) had layout version=1. I deleted them all to see what would happen. Doing an organise now (will do a consolidate pass next), hopefully will sort itself out.

You might also want to take a look at one of my Make a split library portable posts. If performance doesn't drop off you would be better having the library in a portable form on the NAS. If it does you can copy the library files back to an internal drive, then move them back to the NAS and open and close the library there once before migrating to a new/drive or computer.

tt2

Thanks, will take a look.