iTunes re-arranged my entire mp3 collection. Can it be restored?

Chris, you just don't understand. You obviously have a very limited music collection. I have 52 different Pink Floyd Cd's. Pink Floyd only released 12 Studio Cd's. OK. I have bootlegs and imports and live stuff. Many of the bootlegs are titled in other languages. I ripped my cd's with a program called CDEX. It didn't know what these songs were. The internet CD database recognized some but not all of them so I had to type in the names of these. So now I'm opening folders with names I don't recognize or are even in a different language. Of 19,000 mp3's I might be lucky if 9,000 have correct id3 tags. I can't and don't want to go through 10,000 songs and "correct" them jsut so they will look nice through iTunes. They were good enough the way they were for the last 6 or 7 years that I've been collecting them. I just want them back the way they were. Also, I'm now finding that even some of the folders which I thought were untouched have been touched. I open many folders now and find that a lot of songs have been duplicated. The Beatles: Come Together1, Come Together2, Come Together3, Etc. What was once a 95gb Folder is now 107gb. Why would iTunes replicate 12gbs of my files? A few GB could be accounted for by the massive number of new folders created but I'm finding entire albums with each song in there 2, 3, or even 4 times? What a mess.

Chris, I did not jump through hoops. It took about 3 clicks to ruin everything. Don't tell me I told it to change my hard drive. I clicked on Advanced/General/Organize. It asked me if I wanted to organize, I said yes. No boxes to check off. Just said ok. I asked people before I started this whole iTunes thing if it would make any changes to my music folder. My niece said no, two different friends said no. You yourself were very adament, after the fact, that no changes COULD be made. Even to the point of trying to say we were wrong. Why should I have thought that organize would mean anything other than changes to what I was seeing on the screen? Would you have thought that? No, you would not have because you KNEW that iTunes would not change your hard drive. How many warnings would I have liked to recieve. Just one. Like I said it was just a few clicks to do what I did. All I need were the words: You are about to make changes to your Music Folder, would you like to proceed? OK or Cancel. I don't think that's to much to ask for.

> It asked me if I wanted to organize. I said

yes.
So it did ask you (even though you've said
like 10 times that it didn't) but you did not
understand.

I have never said that it didn't ask me. Read above. I have said many times that it asked me. I said that it didn't explain that it was going to change my hard drive. I, and you, and evryone else assumed they were going to change the library. NOT the hard drive. All I asked for is a better explaination of what was going to happen.

> Bummer for you. Sorry your stuff got messed up.

Now you don't even want to go fix it (the ID3 tags)
and want to continue to use Windows Explorer as a
music manager, instead of the many good programs
(including iTunes) available.
Keep in mind that since it's all messed up now, you
still have to fgure out what it is. Why not instead
of simply only changing the filename and folder, fix
the ID3 tags so you won't have to worry about it
again.
Why are you against using the tools available to
better keep track of & identify your music?
You won't take/don't want any advice on how to fix it
and keep it straight, and just want to complain it
did what it did, so I'm done.
Good luck!

It's not that I'm against fixing the id3 tags. It seems this is now the path I will take. It's the fact that it will take months, maybe even years for me to go through each song and do this. And what do I do with the songs I can't identify. I certainly do not know every song from every cd that I own. I am finding a few things that I don't know what to do with. I have found folders with the same song two or three times and when I play them they are not the same song!? And apparently iTunes does not like file names to be more than a certain number of characters long? It has cut short the title of many songs.

And on a last note Chris, (since you're done, you may not read this) I really think your attitude about this has been simply awful. We're coming here for help and you're giving us a hard time. You can't help and it's ******* you off. First you basically call us liars and then, when you find out that what we say is true, you try to make us feel like fools for letting it happen. I am going to forward this thread to whoever I can to see if we can have you removed from the board. We're coming here for some kind of help. Not to be chastised for not knowing what we're doing. In the future, since I'm sure there's nothing I can do to have you removed, If you can't help, at least don't berate the person for not being up on the proper procedures or because we have dared to criticize the APPLE GODS!

And again, thank you for your time. At least I can say we weren't ignored.