Itunes Not Programmer Friendly...

Question

I'm managing my Itunes library. So I have all compilations in it's own folder called "Compilations". So consider the compilation from the movie "Shrek", when viewing this in Itunes window I see the following:
Name Artist Album
My Beloved Monster Eels Shrek
Ideally, I would like to recognize that this is a "compilation" so that I rename the above artist as:
Name Artist Album
My Beloved Monster Comilation - Shrek - Eels Shrek
I would like to change the "artist" info for all those files in my "Comilations" folder, so that every artist is tagged as: "Compilation - Album Name - Artist". I've written a computer program that will create the artist labels in this format. But... Itunes stores all of the "info" about an individual song on the actual file itself. That is, it embeds the information on the actual .mp3 file.
I can not modify the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file, by replacing the the current artist tag with my new tags. I'm running out of options here. I mean what is the use of being able to import/export a playlist, or library, and modifying it, only to have Itunes not recognize the changes???
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I guess I'm not clear what it is you want to achieve...
I see that you're keeping control of the physical organiation of your files. That's fine. You can put them whereever you want. I do the same even though I realise I'm just making more work for myself. Your iTunes library will however be easier to maintain if you organise your library inside the *iTunes Music/Media* folder. For myself I have my compilation tracks stored at:
*\iTunes\iTunes Media\Various Artists\<Album>\## <Track> - <Artist>.<ext>*
I use MediaMonkey's auto organise tool to reorganise the file & folder names according to the tag data as, unlike iTunes, it doesn't clip to 35 characters and I can choose my own pattern.
The logical organisation of your media inside iTunes depends on the tag values. Assuming you want a neatly organised library, setting the *Part of a compilation* flag (unique to iTunes) and *Album Artist* to *Various Artists" or some other appropriate value are required to ensure that iTunes "sees" the tracks as a single album. If not, it sees albums with the same title but different artists as somehow separate things, generating multiple covers for the same album. My post at http://www.samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/groupings.asp gives details. You can use iTunes *Get Info.* to change details for multiple files so editing say the Album Artist for a few thousand files is quite easy within iTunes if you can arrange to select just the files you are interested in.
If your files are staying in the same physical location you can use 3rd party tools to manipulate the tags, however iTunes won't re-read these automatically. If you select a group of files, *Get Info.* and then click OK _WITHOUT MAKING ANY CHANGES_ iTunes will read all the tags and update with any new information.
If you want to move your files around physically then you need to delete from iTunes and re-import from the new location. I use iTunes Folder Watch periodically to catch any stray files that I've moved or imported without updating iTunes.
Changing the Artist for compilation tracks from <Artist> to *Compilation - <Artist> - <Album>* will not provide any organisational benefit within iTunes as far as I can see.
tt2