iTunes changes file name

Hi Yahya,

iTunes organizes everything according to information written into ID tags that are attached to the music files themselves. There are tags for Artist, Title, Album, Date and so forth, and that's what you're seeing when you look at your music in the iTunes window.

You can change any of the information in (most of) the tags whenever you like — selecting a track or a bunch of tracks and then typing Command-I will open an info window that makes it easy to do this. But this is fighting the software, in a way. iTunes will continue to display what's in the ID tags whenever you add new music. I wouldn't recommend it.

There are two main options under iTunes > Preferences > Advanced that control what iTunes does with tracks that are added to the library or have their metadata changed. Copy files... will make iTunes make its own copies of any added tracks that are outside of the media folder, Keep iTunes Media folder organized makes it rename the files and folders to reflect the tags of anything that is inside the media folder. Changes should be made either at the tag level rather than the filename level, or better still made in iTunes after adding to the library instead of before.

If you are really particular about the desired layout of your files and folders then turn off Keep organized before adding to the library, or disable the the Copy files option and store the files outside of the media folder. This second approach may make moving the library harder in future so I wouldn't recommend it. See also File Renamer from Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes if you want to enforce a particular layout for tracks that have already been imported.

tt2