iPod iTunes to iPod: Organizational Problems

[WickedAngel]

I have a laptop and, like most other people, I have all my music in the "My Music" folder. I've set each songs in a different folder within My Music and was wondering if there was a way to get iTunes to seperate these (I have music set in several different folders within My Music, such as Alternative, Metal, Rap, Classic, Classical, OST, etc. etc.). As it stands now, it just brings all the music into the iPod and lumps it altogether.

I would seperate them manually, but there are 665 of them....it would take quite a while to seperate those.

 

[eva01]

what is this "My Music" folder you speak of

anyways I believe you can have iTunes organize your music into Artists so then all your music on your iPod would go into Artist folders.

But i still think you have to set up the music in iTunes to be in different playlists.

 

[swiftaw]

I have a laptop and, like most other people, I have all my music in the "My Music" folder. I've set each songs in a different folder within My Music and was wondering if there was a way to get iTunes to seperate these (I have music set in several different folders within My Music, such as Alternative, Metal, Rap, Classic, Classical, OST, etc. etc.). As it stands now, it just brings all the music into the iPod and lumps it altogether.

I would seperate them manually, but there are 665 of them....it would take quite a while to seperate those.

As far as I am aware, the way your music files are organized on your hard drive is completely independent to how they appear on the ipod.

 

[shamino]

I have a laptop and, like most other people, I have all my music in the "My Music" folder.

Meaning you're on Windows, right?

I've set each songs in a different folder within My Music and was wondering if there was a way to get iTunes to seperate these (I have music set in several different folders within My Music, such as Alternative, Metal, Rap, Classic, Classical, OST, etc. etc.). As it stands now, it just brings all the music into the iPod and lumps it altogether.

The Library shows everything. You can sort the list by different columns if you click on the column headers. If you want to show/hide some columns, right-click the header-row and pick the columns you want to see.

If you want separate playlists with each genre, your best bet is a smart playlist. For instance, one that shows all Rock songs might be:

Genre is rock, live updating
​

Create one of these for each genre, and you're all set.

If you don't have the genre set appropriately, you can bulk-set them pretty quickly. Select everything that should have the genre (ctrl-click them to select as necessary, maybe sort the list by artist, if you think it will help), and then do a "get info" (ctrl-I). Enter the Genre, click OK, and watch them all change.

 

[WickedAngel]

I've managed to fix the problem of how they were organized. I didn't realize that your music would translate over to the iPod exactly as it is shown in the iTunes program. iTunes doesn't automatically sort by alphabetical order, which I finally noticed.

There was something that was a legit problem though...the music titles. For some reason, iTunes uses the title that is listed in the "Properties" section instead of the title that you set when you save a file. If there isn't anything listed in the properties, it defaults to what you saved it as (Which is what it should do to begin with).

This probably isn't something that would have any effect on Apple users, but I'm sure this has perplexed many PC users.

 

[shamino]

There was something that was a legit problem though...the music titles. For some reason, iTunes uses the title that is listed in the "Properties" section instead of the title that you set when you save a file. If there isn't anything listed in the properties, it defaults to what you saved it as (Which is what it should do to begin with).

The "properties" page contains the data from the ID3 tags embedded in the music file itself.

Player software should use this data - that's what it's there for.

Using the filename as the song title is unreliable and often wrong. People don't always use the song name as the filename. Some computers impose naming restrictions that makes it impossible for the filename to exactly match the song name (ever try making a Windows file with a "?" character in the name?) And file names have a habit of changing as they are transmitted across networks.