iTunes Music Management Frustration

[Superman07]

I'm having issues on how best to organize my music through iTunes and it's frustrating me.

Currently I have each of my CDs ripped and placed in a folder based on artist and then album (Music-->Artist-->Albums). However, I find this posses problems for soundtracks and compilations and albums that were associated with multiple hits from the internet database (??).

1) Now for some reason I have multiple folders of the same artist and I didn't put them there. Note, it's not Artist and Artist (1) either, but it does seem to have an additional descriptor.

2) Albums have been moved into new folders such as Various and Compilation. Is this because I checked something within iTunes? I'd often have a album come up several times with a handful of tracks under each listing.

3) I have artists/albums in the Music folder, but they are not showing up in my iTunes-->Music list (within iTunes). Likewise, I will then have to manually add the folder(s) from the File-->Add to Library. Shouldn't iTunes automatically be scanning my C:/Music directory and updating every time I start iTunes?

Any help on these would be appreciated!

 

[GermanSuplex]

First things first: these are tagging issues that you caused, but can fix.

iTunes places things in albums based on the album artist. If the album is a soundtrack or various artist affair, then it will place the album in the Compilations folder. So a normal structure will be Artist > Album or Compilation > Album.

For multiple-artist albums, put "Various Artists" for the album artist and mark the album as part of a compilation.

Also make sure iTunes is set to organize your library. It's silly to organize it yourself unless you truly have some unknown purpose for doing so.

iTunes doesn't have a watch folder feature in the traditional sense. If it's not in iTunes, you'll have to add it yourself or add it to the "Automatically add to iTunes folder". The "Automatically add to iTunes" folder is as close to a watch folder feature as there is right now.