is there anyway to use itunes and still see my folder structure? to see that i have a jazz flder....and inside that jazz flder, i have a vocal jazz folder....and inside that i have a sinatra folder? this is how i listen to music. it's worth $80 to use parallels and media monkey to not have to go through and remove the tags from all of my music and input tags for all of my music. do i have to input tags for each one of my artists....and songs....and genres? i see that a batch tagging process might be convenient for genres....but what about the individual artists.....it looks like i'll still have 5 stevie wonder folders unless i manually change this.
Sorry for the tone, I understand your situation. It's just hard after iTunes gets bagged on by PC users ALL THE TIME when they don't understand the program at all and make snap judgments about it. So, I apologize.
iTunes isn't a player, though. That's the thing. It's a jukebox. There are a couple "players," but iTunes is such a force on the Mac that none of them have really been developed very far. It is designed to help organize and sort your music, help you manage it, not just play it.
First off, the concept of tagging: tags are metadata (data about data, which is to say information about the "data" that is your digital music) that are stored inside your music files. They store information like the artist, the album, what year it was released, what genre it is, track number, disc number, and LOTS of other stuff. Seriously, pick a file in iTunes, right click it and choose "Get Info." See all those tabs across the top? That's all the information that can be stored about just one song. Lots of data, eh?
And the thing is, while your files might have tags that you didn't set right now, you can change them, quickly and easily (and in huge swaths) right in iTunes. Don't like the information that's showing up for your music? Select a file and right click it, and choose Get Info. Now you can edit its tags to have the information you want. If you have a lot of music by an artist or whatnot that you want to change the information for all at once (say, make sure all the files have the artist's name spelled right/input the exact same way, or changing a genre tag for a lot of stuff at once), then select all that stuff and then do Get Info. This will get you a window that lets you edit all of those files' tags at once.
What you're talking about here seems to be a sort of "nested genre" system, i.e. Jazz > Vocal Jazz. Here's the closest way I can figure out to implement that in iTunes:
1) Set the "Grouping" field with the
TOP LEVEL genre, in this case "Jazz." Since you only have about 13 of these so-called "top-level" genres, this is pretty easy, as you can select all the files you want to be tagged this way at once, set the grouping, and then apply it in one operation. Maybe when adding your music to iTunes you could do just one folder at once, so import just your "Jazz" folder, tag ALL of those files with the grouping "Jazz," and then move on to the next set. You could even show the Grouping column in iTunes and sort by it, so you can easily tell which files have been tagged with a grouping and which have not.
2) Tag your files' Genre field with the
SECOND LEVEL genre, which is to say "Vocal Jazz" in this example. So, you could grab all your songs by Frank Sinatra, and set their genre to "Vocal Jazz" in the Get Info window.
3) Make a smart playlist in iTunes for each grouping (your top level genre). A smart playlist is basically a saved query of your iTunes database. You can have a "playlist" which is actually made up of songs that meet search criteria that you set. In this case, you'd set the criteria to be all songs that have a "Grouping" that is "Jazz." Then you'd have a smart playlist in the sidebar which you could call "Jazz." That would show all the songs you've tagged with a grouping of Jazz, and it will live-update—meaning that when you add new songs and tag their "Grouping" field with "Jazz," they'll automatically show up there. So, now you'll have 13 or so smart playlists (Jazz, Classical, Rock, or whatever you like) which break up your collection the way you want it.
4) You can even hit "Cmd+B" to then enter browse mode in the smart playlist, and you'll see your Genres and artists listed up top. So maybe in the Jazz smart playlist with browse turned on, you'll see "Vocal Jazz," "Instrumental Jazz," "Be-bop," "Big-band," "Free Jazz," or whatever other more specific genres you've tagged in the "Genre" column up top. Select "Vocal Jazz" and it will then limit the Artist and Album columns to only the music that is tagged with that genre.
See how you can use iTunes' database to accomplish these things? And because it's all being done in the database, live, you don't have to manually move around folders or files or rename things yourself. Tag once (and since you can tag many things in one swoop, this is easy) and your library suddenly becomes powerful and flexible. This sort of thing only scratches the surface of what you can do with your music once it's in a flexible database like iTunes.
Take your example of having 25 versions of "The Girl from Ipanema." Right now, if I understand it correctly, you'd have those 25 versions strewn about your folders, right? They're not all vocal Jazz, are they? I have a cover of "The Girl from Ipanema" by Pizzicato Five, a Japanese electronica group. In iTunes, even with your genre tags separating these songs into their respective genres,
one click of the "Name" column would INSTANTLY sort your entire library by song name. So all those versions of "The Girl from Ipanema" would be sitting right next to each other. Or you could search for them, if you want to drill down to just them. Even if they ARE just Vocal Jazz, you could select the "Vocal Jazz" genre and then click the "Name" column to sort by song name, accomplishing the same thing within just that genre. Isn't flexibility wonderful?
As to the whole WMA thing, I'm afraid there really aren't any options there. Microsoft designed Windows Media Player the way it did to try and lock you in to their formats. Heck, Apple does the same thing with AAC (though at least they provide an MP3 option in their preferences, if you set it). You didn't know WMP was doing this, and that's just the way Microsoft wanted it. You'll just have to reacquire these songs in MP3, I'm afraid. Once you do though, you'll be guaranteed compatibility with pretty much every device out there—MP3 is the de facto standard for lossy digital music, and has been for a long time.
