2nd destination folder for iTunes media appears in my external hard drive ?

Question

I've been having trouble with my external hard drive that houses my iTunes media (33,000 songs).
I've solved that issue, but during the course of it, because the external was flitting in and out,
I believe the destination for media in iTunes preferences went from : /Volumes/iomega/iTunes Media to
simply "/Volumes/iomega"
Now I have a new external hard drive folder named "Music", and all activity in it is just from yesterday.
My guess is when all this was happening, I'd get the "do you want to organize your media" question from the advanced preferences.
One time I pushed "yes" and a lot of files started buzzing.  I didn't want to wait for 33,000 songs so I stopped.
Am I right in guessing iTunes was reorganizing my stuff to the new folder "Music"?  Less than 1,000 songs are in the file, and
those are no longer in the old "iTunes Media" file. There's really no consistency to what shifted...it might be a single
song shifted over while five others on the same album stayed behind. I can't just shift the folders back because it will replace
the original artist folder with the new one, which will lose a lot of songs.  I tried manually to shift some back song by song and
it worked OK.  But it would take forever to shift them back in that fashion.
Is there a way to get everything back in a single folder?  If I do the "organize" thing thru iTunes and let it run, will it
eventually shift everything from my old "iTunes media" folder to the newer "Music" folder that appeared yesterday?
And will iTunes then recognize that as the active media folder and I'll redirect new media to that folder??

Answer 1

Here are the typical layouts for the iTunes folders (albeit Windows images):
Older versions of iTunes would put artist folder inside the media folder, newer versions inside <Media Folder>/Music. I'm guessing that your library was in the older layout, even if the main folder was called iTunes Media, instead of the new one. There is an option to move from the old layout to the new one. Moving from the new one back to the old one can be achieved by tweaking a hidden preference file in the media folder. There are however good reasons for preferring the newer layout when it comes to moving your library to a new drive or computer. Details in Make a split library portable.
Have I understood the issue? If you really want to force the old layout edit the file .iTunes Preferences.plist in your media folder and change the integer from 1 to 0 then turn the "Keep media folder organized" preference off, then back on again.
tt2