Organizational Dilemma - please advise

[yacoub]

In preparation for getting an iPod I have installed iTunes and am organizing my music, correcting id3 tags, and 'importing' music that I'll want to put on the iPod.

In addition to my albums of music that I'm letting iTunes arrange into folders for me when I 'import' them, I have a large number of singles by a wide variety of artists that I have held off importing because I don't want iTunes to arrange them into a bunch of separate folders when I 'import' them. I have them in one folder (because they share a genre of music) and I want these mp3s to remain in one folder, but I naturally also need to maintain their correct Artist and Title id3 tag info.

How do I 'import' these mp3s into iTunes without it trying to separate each song into a separate folder structure? I'm just fine with having iTunes arrange the rest of my music but these files need to remain in one folder.

Is there a way to take this one folder of mp3s and tell iTunes "import this folder of music but don't break it all up into individual root folders by artist like you do with all my other imported music"?

I can use the "Album" id3 tag element as a way to organize them if that will work? I'm still afraid it's going to create a bunch of Artist folders though. Is there a way to set these as 'Compilation' mp3s before 'importing' them so they don't create all those Artist folders?

[Cold Irons]

Letting iTunes manage your music (which is the right way to go from my perspective) is an all-or-nothing thing. I don't anyway to "partition" the songs into a group that is not "managed". You can do a trick with compilations that should work....

My question would be - why do you care? Once you let iTunes manage your music & get the ID3 tags all correct, everything is good & you don't really need to worry about the directory structure. I, for one, am glad I'm out of the days of spending a lot of time maintaining directories & file naming conventions for audio files - let the tagging info control it all and it is much easier.

Having said that, I think you can get the behavior you desire. On all of these singles, set the Compilation=Yes, and give them all the same Album Name (e.g., "My Single Collection"). Then iTunes (I think) will put them all in the directory (windows XP):
.../iTunes Library/Compilations/My Singles Collection

[yacoub]

okay thanks I'll try that tonight. the reason i desire this is i don't want a ton of folders with these artist names amidst the rest of my music, making a mess of the directory structure. It's more an operating system related preference than anything to do with the iPod itself. i don't want a ton of extraneous folders when one would suffice... it's an inefficiency to do it with individual folders when they can all be in one folder since they're not full albums and all share the same genre.