15 Years Down The Drain

[570934]

I've been building up to a reasonable collection of album since first started with digital media some 15 years ago. I've always been a stickler for having all my files correctly named, grouped by artist, albums etc. All my tags correct, artwork blah blah blah. You get the picture.

I've always been aware of how iTune makes a mess of files, renaming folders, stripping each files name. Well guess which knob accidentally checked the "keep files organised" box........and then set up a new library in iTunes after moving my 120gig of music to a new external drive.

I don't know if I'm more angry at Apple for stomping their flaky renaming efforts of my lameness. 23,000 files now a mess 🙁

Oh forgot to add which is why I way posting this in here. After pissing about seeing if I could get the file from match which may have still been named correctly. But alas they had changed too. So I'm building a new match database but been gathering info for nearly four hours. Can't remember it been this long before. Is this normal for my size of database ?

 

[SilentPanda]

While unfortunate, it's not really Apples fault. The software did exactly what you told it to do, regardless of if you intended to or not.

I have my Poser content library backed up exactly for this reason. The content is very easy to restore should the hard drive get junked up, but the organization of the content would be a pain to replicate.

 

[570934]

While unfortunate, it's not really Apples fault. The software did exactly what you told it to do, regardless of if you intended to or not.

I have my Poser content library backed up exactly for this reason. The content is very easy to restore should the hard drive get junked up, but the organization of the content would be a pain to replicate.

Yeah it did what I asked, but I didn't ask it to strip albums out of my artists directories and give them nice new folder names. Especially moving whole artists just because I had a ' missing. For instance I had Blink 182 but now that folder is empty and I have a new folder Blink-182. Grrrr

Worse this is I just deleted another older backup drive of my collection.

 

[JoelBC]

I feel for you as I have had similar things happen to me...the hard part i snow deciding whether to work through all 23,0000 files or not...good luck...

 

[570934]

I feel for you as I have had similar things happen to me...the hard part i snow deciding whether to work through all 23,0000 files or not...good luck...

Yeah unfortunately I have terrible OCD so as long as I just use iTunes and never look in the music folder and the now mess that it is all in, I may just forget about it, or maybe not god damn it!!!!

Thing what gets me is the extent at which iTunes strips the file names and starts messing with folder names and mass movements of folders too. They should write it in to ask permission when it is renaming users files.

 

[akm3]

Just restore from your backups or rollback with Time Machine?

You must have backups, or you'll be even more angry when you LOSE your 120gb music collection?

Like iPhoto, iTunes, etc, I like it all organized 'my way', but I had to just let go and let it do it its way.

 

[JoelBC]

Yeah unfortunately I have terrible OCD so as long as I just use iTunes and never look in the music folder and the now mess that it is all in, I may just forget about it, or maybe not god damn it!!!!

Thing what gets me is the extent at which iTunes strips the file names and starts messing with folder names and mass movements of folders too. They should write it in to ask permission when it is renaming users files.

I hear 'ya as I too fall into that camp...I would suggest that you think of it as a test and see ho wit goes, it may be the start of curing your OCD...

 

[mmomega]

Been there, done it, not as large a collection as yours but close.

In the end it was my fault, my wife said I was a bear to live with for a day or so.

Hey at least you didn't have someone connect to your external drive to a Windows machine and then Windows said it needed to format the drive to read it so they formatted it, then they proceed to tell you 5 mins later, "So where is all this music you're supposed to have?"

 

[570934]

Just restore from your backups or rollback with Time Machine?

You must have backups, or you'll be even more angry when you LOSE your 120gb music collection?

Like iPhoto, iTunes, etc, I like it all organized 'my way', but I had to just let go and let it do it its way.

Well there's a story. The whole reason behind me rebuilding my iTunes was I'd run out of space on my Mini with a added 1TB drive. I had an 2TB external drive for time machine. Here was my thinking:

Use the 1TB drive for my ever growing photos and videos from my family's iphones/ipads etc
Keep the 500gig MAc drive for OSX etc
Use the 2TB external drive for iTunes which also includes nearly 400 films
Buy a new 3TB external drive for time machine

I set this all up but of course I had to delete the old backup on the 2TB drive, yeah I know I should have transfered it to the 3TB drive and that was my mistake really.
So when I imported the tracks into iTunes thats when it did the file/folder rename mashing.

@JoelBC Yeah unfortunately there's not much curing my OCD! See below 🙂

@mmomega Wives say the most useless things at times

Anyway, every (i)Cloud has a silver lining. I had been meaning to take advantage of iTunes Match and the increase in quality compared to most of my old original CD rips. I now find myself sat here on my work Win7 machine downloading all my files from the cloud, and because my ID Tags were all correct I'm using a little program to rename the file again using the tag info.

OK so it's going to take me a while but at least I can sleep at night knowing the files are correct lol.

 

[blueroom]

Why didn't you have a backup?

 

[570934]

See the story above. I did have a backup but it was of the renamed files 🙁

 

[PosterNutbag.]

I had something wierd happen to me this summer and here is what I did. I don't know the exact steps but here is what I recall.

I bought my first mac. I have a ton of live music so I have many repeat song names. When I imported them in.... it dumped my entire directory structure into a single folder and then added "duplicate" to the file name.

I later added iTunes match. Once I had it sorted out in itunes, I just deleted all of the music off my local machine and then re-downloaded it from icloud. The directory structures are now intact.