Do you let iTunes organize your music?

[mini.boss]

Just curious how people prefer to organize their music.


Ive been using iTunes for years and always tried organizing it on my own since i prefer more descriptive filenames (artist - song) and stored things by genre. But last month i accidentally let iTunes organize it and now everything is renamed and truncated (PC version).

iTunes organizing isnt that bad, but my biggest problem is that it not only organizes my music but also my video. It went from 18GB of songs to 90GB of songs, movies and podcasts. That makes it difficult to do music-library backups and keeping a sync'd copy of the music on my smaller notebook.

[Jesse Hollington]

I agree that the videos add an additional wrinkle to the process, and I would really like to see a way to define a separate "iTunes Video Folder" in a future version.

However, I have let iTunes organize my music library for me pretty much since day one.... Prior to using iTunes, I used to mess with file-folder structures all the time, and it was really quite a big nuisance. I actually very much liked the fact that iTunes would take care of those little organizational details for me.

IMHO, the only reason to not let iTunes manage your music organization is if you have other programs that rely on a file/folder structure that you have to co-operate with.

If you're using iTunes exclusively for your music library management, however, there's really no reason not to just let it do so. The idea is that you manage everything through iTunes, and let it worry about the underlying details of where to put things and how to organize them. I can't remember the last time I even looked at my iTunes folders, as I don't really need to be bothered with it.... I have the comfort level of knowing that as I edit/rename tag information, the underlying files will not only contain the tags, but will be organized in a sufficiently descriptive fashion that I would be able to find anything if I ever needed to (not that I have in over two years).

There are also a few little features that aren't well-documented that really take away the need to manage a file-system organization.... You can right-click on any track in your iTunes library and select "Show in Finder/Explorer", and it will open a Finder or Windows Explorer window right to that location.

In addition, the really big one is that you can actually copy music OUT OF iTunes simply by dragging-and-dropping a selection of tracks from iTunes to any other folder on your computer. So if you need to extract a playlist of music for some reason, just select the playlist, do a "Select-All" and then drag-and-drop to a folder. All of those tracks will be copied to that location, eliminating the need to worry about maintaining separate folders for your playlists "just in case" you ever want to view that grouping of tracks.

[baggss]

Nope. To much music spread across to many drives to let iTunes do it.

[Jesse Hollington]

Yes, that would be the one other reason I could see to not have iTunes manage your music library for you, although even when I was doing that I was able to span my music to secondary drives using symbolic links so that I could still benefit from the automatic management of the underlying files.

Ultimately, though, I just bought a bigger hard drive....

[oobujoobu]

A year ago the thought of letting iTunes organize my music would have horrified me. But I tried it about 6 months ago, whilst keeping a back up of my old file structure and library just in case, but I've never looked back, life is SO much easier now that I have accepted the way iTunes does this and have just let it get on with it.

[RatherPlayHalo]

Nope. I'm way too paranoid to just hand the reins over to iTunes.

[bwh79]

Before I got my iPod (and therefore before I ever used iTunes) I just had all my music files jumbled together in one giant folder. I also had a bunch of crap in there that I've never listened to, and probably never will. Now the only time I even touch that folder is when I'm going through the files that haven't been imported to iTunes yet, and either importing then deleting them, or simply deleting the ones I don't want. iTunes copies everything to the iTunes Music folder when it imports, and keeps everything within that folder organized. I rarely have a need to even LOOK at the file in the folder system, but when I do, "Show in Explorer" works just fine for me. I'm fairly on top of keeping my music tagged, at least artist and album tags, so I should never have a problem finding the files if I should need to, but why would I need to?

Yes, I let iTunes organize my music.

[ctg115]

It took me a while to feel comfortable letting iTunes handle it after years of file management, but now I prefer it. Now I rarely mess with the underlying files.

[Ausar]

Well alright, I guess i'll give auto iTunes music library organization another shot.

[mnhnhyouh]

Nope. I dont. I organize it myself. I let iTunes manage my iPod.

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[Piranhahaha]

Yes, I do and have not had any issues.

Mind you I know how to fake out iTunes to bend to my will, but after two separate transfers of the database, I think my decision to let iTunes sort things served me well.