i-tunes destroyed my organized mp3 folder, can this be fixed?

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wudini

[H]ard|Gawd
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got an ipod for christmas and finally got around to putting itunes on my pc. and i guess i missed the checkbox i had to uncheck that said: "would you like i-tunes to destroy your neatly organized mp3 folders?"

700+ albums in their own folder titled all nice and neat, gone. i've come to the realization that i'll probably never fix it. what really sucks about it though is if a song has maybe a feature artist in it, and that's labeled in the "Artist" portion of the ID3 Tag...that ONE song now has it's own folder. is there ANY way i can undo this mess?

sorry if this should have gone in the Apple section..
 
Open up Windows Media Player 10, tell it to rearange/rename music according to your rip settings and to overwrite all information. Add all of the files to the library. Right click on each album and select "update album info".
 
I hate iTunes, I refuse to even buy an iPod because I hate that stupid program so much...

Back when Moutain Dew had the free song download promotion, I used to install iTunes, download a song, burn it to a CD, uninstall iTunes, and then rip the one track CD as an mp3 :p
 
That's what you get for using iTunes. :(

Tip: never use any Apple crap. They all suck. :mad:
 
If you tag your songs properly, this wouldn't happen. And actually you did miss the option where you can tell iTunes not to organize your music collection.

Put ALL your songs in iTunes and tag ALL of them properly. Then delete your entire playlist, move the files out of your iTunes folder, then drag them ALL properly tagged back into iTunes.
 
Shameless Liar said:
If you tag your songs properly, this wouldn't happen. And actually you did miss the option where you can tell iTunes not to organize your music collection.

Put ALL your songs in iTunes and tag ALL of them properly. Then delete your entire playlist, move the files out of your iTunes folder, then drag them ALL properly tagged back into iTunes.
Click to expand...
or tag them all properly then go to "Advanced">"Consolidate Library"


learn to use iTunes..you really are ignorant if you say it sucks without even learning how to use it properly


oh yea. there ARE other programs taht you can use your ipod with instead of itunes, winamp with the ipod plugin is one, ephpod is another....lots out there..google....

dunno if you know this or not...but itunes puts the songs into folders in the itunes library according to artist then album title

and if the album is a bunch of various artists, label all the songs in the album as "part of a compilation" (right click> get info>info tab> check the box, you should see it) and all the songs on that album (As long as theya re all tagged like this, and have the same album name) will be moved to a folder in the main itunes library folder called "Compilations"

oh yea....the "turn off itunes automatic organization that will destroy my ub3r 1337 organization methods!" button is in preferences>advanced tab>youll see it


ps. if you can't tell, i hate it when people knock apples stuff when it only sucks to them because they can't use it. i apologize if anyone is offended by my post, i don't mean to attack anyone personally......
 
lol..whatever

my guess is it is something up with your PC, cus itunes and quicktime work fine for me :)
 
sorry to hear about your file/folder system getting jacked-up by itunes.

while i don't have a solution to reverting every file location back to the original format, i do know of a very good app called "anapod" that is an alternative to using itunes to communicate with an ipod:
http://www.redchairsoftware.com/anapod/

it costs a few bucks to purchase, but makes the process of adding/removing music from the ipod more like dragging and dropping in windows explorer (in addition to many other features). hope this helps!
 
I also did the exact same thing and had the exact same problem when all tracks were properly labeled in IDv3 format, ripped with Music Match, and played with Winamp lite. I decided to try itunes and it ripped apart the MANY (like 120) various artists, compilations, and soundtracks I had. Yes, my fault, but due to this one error letting Apple's app have control, I have not used it since for anything. I organize, rip, and play my library with anything BUT iTunes. I also love my current setup for playing the files the way I want them played. I could never get my iTunes installs to organize by Artist, Album, Track, Song Name like I wanted. It always mixed my stuff up. Alas my pain was to great and I totally reorganized my library like it was originally by hand; seven hours later it was back to normal. Thankfully this happened with iTunes 4.x, so I had a smaller library. Now I don't install it and use winamp instead. I have no need for the music store, and when I do I have a guinea pig machine I care nothing about to download and burn the free Pepsi songs on so I never soil my machine. then rip and enjoy!
 
same thing happened to me.
it did not mess much with my normal cds too much but my compilations and soundtracks were hosed.

it really does not make much sense for itunes to organize by artist. and the option to reorganize needs to be better relabeled, or have an undo feature. or even allow you to "re-folder" by artist, album, year and so forth, if it should exist at all.

honestly i was pissed at itunes for a while and i spent a good day reorganizing some 100cds manually, but its a good software at the core, it just has shortcomings like all other softwares out there.
 
Slartibartfast said:
I hate iTunes, I refuse to even buy an iPod because I hate that stupid program so much...
Click to expand...
no, you refuse to buy an ipod because either you don't really want one, or you are unaware that itunes is not the only program to put music on an ipod.
 
there are only 2 daps above ipod so...

apart from being overpriced and expensive accessories, ipod is not that bad of a dap.
 
this doesnt solve your problem and I am not a big fan of itunes however this all would have been avoided if you had read everything before you clicked.
 
So before this turns into a complete brand related flame fight I have a question.

If Itunes moved all the music and renamed it wouldnt using the windows XP restore point feature work to fix it just by taking the computer back to yesterdays hard drive? I never use that feature but It sounds like it may be usefull.
 
That isn't feasible in my case: I use networked drives here at work so I can hide all my machines in closets out of the way. Therefore no I couldn't. However I think that may be a null point anyway because system restore is not supposed to touch any of your documents or program related files. So even if I was keeping all the files on a local drive, and even if it was on the same partition and not a separate one (Why ANYONE would do that to a massive library I don't know), it would remove iTunes and should not touch the files you ahve created that are not related to the application. That would be like creating a Word doc then screwing up and getting a virus laden screen saver later in the day. If you do a system restore, it will leave the doc and just get rid of any program and associated registry entries.

Anyone tried it to tell us whether it's right or wrong?
 
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