iTunes Media Organization in iTunes 9

[sammich]

Or you could go in to Time Machine......delete all backups of ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music and then have it backup everything fresh.

Only do that if you don't need the incremental TM backups of your music files.

-Kevin

I've been changing the naming conventions for all my TV Shows, as such TM has brand new copies of these byte-sized changes, and that drive has 60 GB less space for about 10kB of changes.

Anywho, if my internal laptop drive bunks out on me while TM does the fresh backup, someone is gonna burn

 

[GermanSuplex]

So what alternative do you propose?

You can't just complain without having some kind of suggestion on how to remedy the situation...



anyway, the organization didn't seem to work quite right for me. I have about 20 artist folders under the "iTunes Media" directory - meaning above the music folder in the new structure. I just made sure they were all tagged as "music" in iTunes, which they were. Anyone else run into this issue?

I guess i may just have to manually move them and re-add them to the library.




EDIT:

hmm... it appears that these files were duplicated somehow. So in addition to being in the aforementioned directory, they were also in the ~/Music/iTunes Music/Music directory. Weird.

I'm not sure why they were duplicated, but when I let iTunes reorganize my media, I had about 20 folders left in the top level. It turns out iTunes was being nice and not deleting files that weren't in the iTunes library. Those files were folder.jpg files, probably from WMP. No actual media files were in the folders, so I deleted them all.

The problem, however, is that because iTunes is also trying to make sure that any other programs that accessed those stray files can still do so, it didn't rename my folder "iTunes Media", it just kept it as "iTunes Music". Is it a big deal? No. All the media folders are there (Music, TV Shows, Podcasts, Audiobooks, Movies, etc.) And truth be told its my fault and it shows iTunes will safeguard your media and never delete anything unless you tell it do so.

But I would like to be able to rename it iTunes Media without having to consolidate everything.

 

[devburke]

I'm not sure why they were duplicated, but when I let iTunes reorganize my media, I had about 20 folders left in the top level. It turns out iTunes was being nice and not deleting files that weren't in the iTunes library. Those files were folder.jpg files, probably from WMP. No actual media files were in the folders, so I deleted them all.

The problem, however, is that because iTunes is also trying to make sure that any other programs that accessed those stray files can still do so, it didn't rename my folder "iTunes Media", it just kept it as "iTunes Music". Is it a big deal? No. All the media folders are there (Music, TV Shows, Podcasts, Audiobooks, Movies, etc.) And truth be told its my fault and it shows iTunes will safeguard your media and never delete anything unless you tell it do so.

But I would like to be able to rename it iTunes Media without having to consolidate everything.

You can rename it iTunes Media and you won’t have to consolidate anything. I renamed it from iTunes Music and just kept right on using iTunes without a hitch. Of course, you will have to put up with Time Machine backing up everything in that folder all over again.

 

[tdmac]

What doesn't make sense to me is why the iTunes Media folder is still located under Music. Not saying it's a better solution, but shouldn't they have moved it to ~/iTunes/iTunes Media or something similar?

You also can make the argument of why then do they still call it itunes when tunes refers to music and not media. So a directory, named itunes makes no literal sense either.

Hopefully Apple is doing this in baby steps by first allowing you to segregate the types of media and then will add in the ability to set the path to those folders. Only reason why I can see that this hasn't been done is that "consolidating the library" would be affected since you don't want to put all media in the same location. They would have to build functionality to consolidate media type. So that you can make sure alll of your music is consolidated to your specified music folder and movies to the movie folder/ folder name of your choosing, etc.

hmm... it appears that these files were duplicated somehow. So in addition to being in the aforementioned directory, they were also in the ~/Music/iTunes Music/Music directory. Weird.

When you consolidate, the original files are only copied to the new consolidated location. Thus, you will still have all of the original files in the previous directory before consolidating. You can delete those files.

 

[SimonJ]

I used to laugh at how deep you'd have to go in Windows to get to your files, but now I see Apple is headed there, too. Seriously, to get to my songs I have to go to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Music now? Really?

Granted, you don't actually have to go there as everything is managed by iTunes, but this is getting ridiculous.

 

[GermanSuplex]

You can rename it iTunes Media and you won’t have to consolidate anything. I renamed it from iTunes Music and just kept right on using iTunes without a hitch. Of course, you will have to put up with Time Machine backing up everything in that folder all over again.

I'm using Windows XP, but dang, you're right!

That's very odd. Not sure why that is, because a big thing about iTunes in the past is never, never rename your folders lest you end up with dead links, but it worked for me.

Thanks for the tip.

 

[devburke]

I'm using Windows XP, but dang, you're right!

That's very odd. Not sure why that is, because a big thing about iTunes in the past is never, never rename your folders lest you end up with dead links, but it worked for me.

Thanks for the tip.

Well I dunno if iTunes is just smart enough to somehow keep track of them, or if it just works in this case because iTunes Media is a name it looks for. I’m guessing renaming it to some other random thing wouldn’t work.