Messy itunes library question

[bcksrckchad]

I'm soon going to be purchasing my first mac, and I had been looking at how I can best transfer my music library from my PC to a new mac when I realized how incredibly messy my music library is. I have a folder for each artist in my "music" folder (this was for Windows MP, but I switched to itunes after 2 years), but my itunes folder is in there as well, and it definitely does not have all my music in there. I tried to consolidate as some of my friends have suggested, but I get an error message saying "The file name is too long".

I really want to make sure that I can transfer all my music over without losing any of it, but I'm really confused on the best way to make sure I get all my music into itunes on what will be my new mac. Anyone have any suggestions?

I'm kind of tempted to just take all the music files, throw them in one giant folder on an external hard drive, drag them across, and have itunes sort them out, but that seems like it could be a disaster as well...

 

[misterwebmaster]

there may be only a few files that are holding up your consolidation. Find them, change the file name to something shorter, and then try consolidating.

I'm not sure of any utility that can sort by file name length, however : (

 

[AppleNewton]

its hard to determine, but what i would do either put a folder on your desktop or on an external drive and find where all the music is located and put it in one folder then drag and drop into itunes and it will auto arrange it all and be abit more cleaner and less cluttered than before.

 

[HBOC]

What AppleNewton said is probably the "less messy" way of getting it organized with the transfer. There is no doubt the tags are going to be wrong and you will have duplicates of album art and such. Just the nature of coming from PC to Mac.

How big is your iTunes library?

 

[bcksrckchad]

I've got over 5,000 songs, so there was no way I was going to manually fix all of them. I just don't have the time...

Thanks for the advice. I still have plenty of time before I make the switch, but I want to get all my ducks in a row.

 

[AppleNewton]

I've got over 5,000 songs, so there was no way I was going to manually fix all of them. I just don't have the time...

Thanks for the advice. I still have plenty of time before I make the switch, but I want to get all my ducks in a row.

Understandable.
in comparison i helped with a similar issue with afriends library who had about 2 or 3x that many songs and it took me a couple of weeks to get it all straightened out, once you get all the songs in one prime location you can import them into itunes, and get album artwork by (right clicking and select album artwork..you can additionally select all the songs/albums and do it and it will batch add the artwork where available).

Then if oyu let iTunes manage your library any Tagging information you edit will automatically edit the file name itself too.

so if you have somehting like this as a file

The Band Name - 01 - Track Name Here

or The band name - 01 - The track name goes here

if you edit the track you can just reformat it to just the track name in iTunes and the file name will be applied with the changes and will look like:
01 - Track Name Here


a bit time consuming but believe me once its done, youre set to go and makes it that much easier to take care of your library from here on out