Okay, where do I begin? First, let me lay out my computer and how I store my music so you guys can get an idea. I have all of my songs on my computer (which spans two harddrives, one for storage which is partitioned) packed into my 'My Music' folder in 'My Documents'. Inside there lies the iTunes folder. Now, everything was fine as of a few days ago. I've been successfully managing my iTunes and all of my music with a simple system: When I have a song I would like on my iTunes, I first put the song in my 'My Music' folder, then I open up iTunes and drag it in. While it might be something not many people do, I've gotten used to this method.
The Mistake
So I was fumbling around in my 'My Music' folder, when I came across an old folder called 'tf' I shoved in there a while back. It contained about 200 songs in which I had on my desktop for the longest time. I added this folder to the 'My Music' folder and then to iTunes, eventually, and that was that. It seemed like a waste of space, however, because all of the songs in the 'tf' folder where already sitting in the 'My Music' folder by themselves. I double checked this by dragging everything in the 'tf' folder to 'My Music' and was asked "Do you wish to overwrite?" for every single file. At that point, the 'tf' folder's existence seemed null, so I deleted it. Soon after, I opened up iTunes and tried playing a song, which I realized the horrendous mistake I made. I immediately started checking other songs and my stupidity was quickly apparent. I was now stuck with about 200 songs that I would have to manually direct iTunes to the new, correct file path, in order for me to play them. An idea immediately popped into my head - why not just plug in my iPod and export everything to iTunes?
The Hole Gets Deeper
At this point, I was pretty certain there was no way to export anything on the iPod into iTunes, without the use of third party software. So I opened up google and ran a search for my issue at hand. The first thing I stumbled upon was a little guide from a guy who was trying to do the exact same thing as me. He was able to do this without the use of an third party software. Here is the guide. I followed all of the steps, particularly the one that told me to make sure my iTunes settings included having iTunes automatically organize my music and to have iTunes copy files to the iTunes music folder when adding to the library. Upon finishing, everything seemed perfect. The amount of data in my library was what it was before, and everything seemed to be fine. In the back of my mind, I knew I didn't get off that easy. Within 30 seconds something unfortunate caught my eye. Dozens of songs had been renamed to random, four letter combinations. Dozens quickly turned into hundreds. [My library was/is 8.9gb.] Panic kicked in and I had no clue what to do. I decided to try the steps over again, this time without checking the two options I normally never used. No luck. At this point, my 'My Music' folder was approximately 26gb. All of my songs were still sitting in the 'My Music' folder, however, iTunes put everything from my library into organized folders to add to all of my songs that were there previously. I was running out of harddrive space on both drives, to make things worse. I came to the conclusion that it would take a very, very long time to manually rename all of these files; time I was and am not prepared to dedicate to this nightmare.
My Last Hope
I came up with a couple of potential solutions while I was sitting in my class last night. I thought maybe I could start over again from scratch and copy all of the songs in my 'My Music' folder straight to iTunes. Meaning, copy only the files themselves, nothing from the newly created folders, which is all of the same data anyway, correct? I checked this out and remembered I had several folders filled with music in my 'My Music' folder before iTunes took it over and made its own folders. All of those folders I had are now lost, it seems. I don't know how or why the folders are gone, yet all of the individual files remain. This option now seems like a poor one. My next option was to come here, and beg for mercy for the terrible mistake I've committed. I prayed before I went to sleep last night that the brilliant brains of this community, or any other on the web, could help me solve my overwhelming problem. Sorry this is so long, I just wanted to get everything in here in full detail so anyone that is kind enough to help, will understand my predicament.
Thank you, and apologies if this wasn't the correct forum for this; I scanned the list of forums and this seemed appropriate. Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks.
The Mistake
So I was fumbling around in my 'My Music' folder, when I came across an old folder called 'tf' I shoved in there a while back. It contained about 200 songs in which I had on my desktop for the longest time. I added this folder to the 'My Music' folder and then to iTunes, eventually, and that was that. It seemed like a waste of space, however, because all of the songs in the 'tf' folder where already sitting in the 'My Music' folder by themselves. I double checked this by dragging everything in the 'tf' folder to 'My Music' and was asked "Do you wish to overwrite?" for every single file. At that point, the 'tf' folder's existence seemed null, so I deleted it. Soon after, I opened up iTunes and tried playing a song, which I realized the horrendous mistake I made. I immediately started checking other songs and my stupidity was quickly apparent. I was now stuck with about 200 songs that I would have to manually direct iTunes to the new, correct file path, in order for me to play them. An idea immediately popped into my head - why not just plug in my iPod and export everything to iTunes?
The Hole Gets Deeper
At this point, I was pretty certain there was no way to export anything on the iPod into iTunes, without the use of third party software. So I opened up google and ran a search for my issue at hand. The first thing I stumbled upon was a little guide from a guy who was trying to do the exact same thing as me. He was able to do this without the use of an third party software. Here is the guide. I followed all of the steps, particularly the one that told me to make sure my iTunes settings included having iTunes automatically organize my music and to have iTunes copy files to the iTunes music folder when adding to the library. Upon finishing, everything seemed perfect. The amount of data in my library was what it was before, and everything seemed to be fine. In the back of my mind, I knew I didn't get off that easy. Within 30 seconds something unfortunate caught my eye. Dozens of songs had been renamed to random, four letter combinations. Dozens quickly turned into hundreds. [My library was/is 8.9gb.] Panic kicked in and I had no clue what to do. I decided to try the steps over again, this time without checking the two options I normally never used. No luck. At this point, my 'My Music' folder was approximately 26gb. All of my songs were still sitting in the 'My Music' folder, however, iTunes put everything from my library into organized folders to add to all of my songs that were there previously. I was running out of harddrive space on both drives, to make things worse. I came to the conclusion that it would take a very, very long time to manually rename all of these files; time I was and am not prepared to dedicate to this nightmare.
My Last Hope
I came up with a couple of potential solutions while I was sitting in my class last night. I thought maybe I could start over again from scratch and copy all of the songs in my 'My Music' folder straight to iTunes. Meaning, copy only the files themselves, nothing from the newly created folders, which is all of the same data anyway, correct? I checked this out and remembered I had several folders filled with music in my 'My Music' folder before iTunes took it over and made its own folders. All of those folders I had are now lost, it seems. I don't know how or why the folders are gone, yet all of the individual files remain. This option now seems like a poor one. My next option was to come here, and beg for mercy for the terrible mistake I've committed. I prayed before I went to sleep last night that the brilliant brains of this community, or any other on the web, could help me solve my overwhelming problem. Sorry this is so long, I just wanted to get everything in here in full detail so anyone that is kind enough to help, will understand my predicament.
Thank you, and apologies if this wasn't the correct forum for this; I scanned the list of forums and this seemed appropriate. Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks.