Changing the Hierarchy of File organisation in iTunes Media.

Question

Hi All,
Am sure many are facing this issue that i have, from what posts I've seen so far.
It's the issue of having sorted or organised your music with iTunes, and when you need to move songs to your phone or back up external HArd Disk, we need to move it in the EXACT Same structure in which iTunes has them organised.
Let me explain:-
My Current Itunes Media Folder list is sorted by the Artist > Album > *.mp3
I have a huge collection of Music across 4 Languages, and there are possibilities that the same Artist could have sung a sung in 2 different Languages.
So at times when I open an Artist's Folder i can see two sub folders for Language.
If say, I wanted to have a Folder with only songs belonging to a particular Language, How do i achieve that? (I have my Library Categorised with ALBUM as Lang1, Lang2, Lang3) etc, that was meaningful to me than having the Album or Movie Name.
Ideally i would want ALL songs in a Particular language to be under ONE Folder, currently iTunes doesnt do that, it creates multiple folders with Artist Name and stores the song under that particular Folder name of the Artist. Again another headache, If lets say i have a song sung by Artist1 and Artist2 together, then again thats a new folder!
Reason Im asking this is because I migrated ALL my music from Windows to a Mac and spent considerable time, organising them by language (using the Album Tag), and now if i need to do a back up or Re Sync my Back up and my itunes library im having a tough time.
I would want an option where in, I can have on SINGLE FOLDER which will be my master DUMP of all my music not categorised by Folders or yes maybe folders at Language Level.
Music>Language(Or Genre) > *.mp3 - This is the structure I'm wanting to achieve, given the fact that my current most upto date Library is the itunes library, how do I do that, please help.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Let's get backup sorted to start with. If you use the scheme outlined in this user tip then, as long as all the media is inside the iTunes Media folder which in turn is inside the main iTunes folder, the backup copy can act as a fully functioning library ready to sync with any of your devices. Backup is easy because the software scans and adds any new or updated files. Restoring is either everything following a complete disaster, or replacing the album/artist folder deleted in error to the matching path, so again not too tricky.
The scheme above works whether you let iTunes organize the media or not, but it should all be inside the iTunes Media folder if your library is to be portable and work from any path. If you're using iTunes for managing media it really doesn't matter where the files are as long as it can find them and you can back up. If, however, you really want to impose some other structure on your files you can take my script ConsolidateByMoving and modify it so that it moves files to your personal preference instead of where iTunes would normally put them. You could also use the Auto-Organize from Tag features in MediaMonkey, or some other third party tool, but then you would need to fix broken links or remove and reimport the media, losing ratings, playlists, play counts etc.
tt2