ITunes organization trouble

Hey, this is my first time posting here, so I hope someone can help me.
I've used iTunes for a couple years now, and I never had any trouble with it.
But lately there seems to be some error with the organization, iTunes won't take off 'The' in the beggining of an artist name, at least not all the time, so, for example, when I want to listen to a song from 'The Killers', I have to look in K first, where are some of the songs, and then look on T, where the rest of them are. I don't know why this is happening, it's pretty annoying 'cause most of my artist that start with 'The' seem to have split in to two groups, and I use iTunes organization, so my folders are all split too.
Anyone know how to solve this?

I ran into this as well. It seems, when I originally upgraded to iTunes 9, my organization remained intact. All my new music, movies and TV Shows were all going to an external drive I have with a folder called iTunes Music. Then when I upgraded to 9.0.1., I just recently noticed that all new "media" was going to a folder in my Music Folder called "iTunes Media". In further looking at the folder, I saw very specific orgazational structure. I am reading that somehow this occurs when prompted with the option of new iTunes 9 organization, however, I never opted for this organization and upgrading to iTunes 9.0.1 seems to have triggered it and redirected all my new media to the new folder located on my local internal drive as opposed to the external.
I too have the same question. How do I get everything to point back to the external drive, AND, move all the media that is now in the new iTunes Media folder over to the folder on my iTunes drive and have it all properly organized. I've tried a few ways, but it keeps leaving out the newly added content. Anyone have any suggestions?

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Okay, I have a question that I can't seem to get a good answer to.
I am a manager of a couple of local bands that are always sending me MP3's. Most of the time, its jus part of a song, with no ID tags. I have a folder on my desktop that I save all the songs to, where I customize the filename of each song so I know when it was sent to me, what the song is called (today), and what band sent it.
Right now I have iTunes set up to organize my music.
Here's my problem. I want to be able to see the music in iTunes. So I tried dragging the folder over... okay, except now the music is showing up with blank artist and song info. BAD. And then I figured out that iTunes doesn't 'monitor' this folder, as I saved new music, and it didn't turn up in iTunes. So I dragged the folder over again, now things are showing up TWICE - thank you very much for making my life difficult. And since they aren't showing up all in one place, I can't go in an delete them all and start again.
What I REALLY want, and I'm not sure if this is possible or not, is to have a FOLDER in the iTunes library called mybands, and have all the songs there. Now, songs are constantly added (sent via email, saved to this folder). So I want iTunes to monitor this folder and show the recent additions. But I also want iTunes to delete songs from this folder when I delete in the Library, instead of doing that stupid 'show file' thing.
I'd like to be able to make all the changes to the ID3 tags there too.
Can I do this? If so, does the folder have to be in the iTunes library folder to make this happen? I'd LIKE to continue to use the iTunes organize my music feature... I've never turned it off so I don't know what will work and what wont.
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If you turn off the auto-organize feature, then you can allow tracks to reside in whatever folder you want. Trouble is, iTunes doesn't do ANYTHING to display tracks by folder - only tags are used.
Overall this is a sensible approach - in my 15,500 song library I certainly don't care what the folder/file names are, that would be a horrible organizational scheme when there are so many useful parameters to use (genre, year, compilations, comments etc.)
I would recommend that you install a second media player that is "folder centric" like Winamp for use with the files sent to you by bands. You can setup a "watch folder" and listen to tracks in Winamp without disturbing iTunes in the least.
An alternative that requires a bit of work is to manually tag MP3s in the folder BEFORE dragging them into iTunes. A utility like ID3-TagIT can be used to add some special tags en masse to allow you to identify songs in the "mybands" folder, etc.

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I love the way itunes organizes music via it makes folders & folders of artist & album all organized in the finder, i am trying to do the same with all my photos....is there anyway way iphoto can super automaticly organize my pictures like itunes & create folders in the finder? also...can it update on the fly & import & delete on the fly like itunes does???? ALL reflecting what the library has compared to the created folders it made automaticlly????? PLEASE HELP!!!!!

Hi Powerbook,
iPhoto works differently than iTunes.
This is how iPhoto organizes...
This is a view of how the iPhoto Library looks in the Finder.
It is organized by Year folders. Inside the Year folders are Month folders. Inside the Month folders are the days of the Month. Inside the day folders are the photos you took on that day. If you imported video clips and RAW files on that day they will be in an Originals folder. If you have edited any photo imported on that day, the original will be in that folder also.
Two Apple kbs for you to read
Don't tamper with files in the iPhoto library folder
About the iPhoto Library folder
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thanks

Hi. If you are really lucky the folder containing your media is protected by Volume Shadow Copy and it might be possible to restore the structure. That said 100Gb of data is a pretty big chunk so the change may have been ignored as too big to bother archiving. I'm sorry I don't have any tips to offer on this Windows feature.
iTunes only reorganizes data inside the designated media folder. And then only if you let it. The default install of iTunes will create a new empty folder for media to go to and if you had kept your media separate in some other location to import to iTunes then iTunes would have created fresh copies leaving the originals in their folder layouts. iTunes does not record the paths files were at when they were imported, unless they are outside the media folder and iTunes is not making copies, or they are inside the media folder but iTunes is not organizing them. There is no way within iTunes to undo such reorganization. Normally restoring a backup would take care of the problem but it seems clear that you don't have one.
iTunes has specific rules for structuring media, generally along the lines of <Media Folder>\<Media Kind>\<Artist>\<Album>\## <Name>.<Ext>. I have scripts that can be used/modified to impose a different structure, but that only works if the data to drive the organization is present in the tags. From the sound of things you have lost selections of media (effectively Playlists) that were identified by the location rather than the metadata. I can't offhand think of a way to retrieve that information.
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Matt, I think I lost the songs because I wasn't careful to de-select them before trashing another song in the Library.
When making up a playlist for a CD or my iPod, I might organize a list in the Library by Date Added, check the most recent songs and add them to a playlist. Then I might have resorted the library list by Name (of song), and the most recent additions would disappear from the top of the library list.
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Hello spiritedSmile
Check out the article below that will explain and assist with moving your iTunes library to another location.
iTunes for Windows: Moving your iTunes Media folder
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1364
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Regards,
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I'm hoping someone here has a solution to this. Here goes:
All of my music was originally imported straight off the CD's. I recently (about 4 months ago) deleted (lost due to HDD crash actually) my entire iTunes library. So, I spent many hours stacking all my CD's on the table and re-importing them all one by one.
After completing the re-importation, I burned all of the files onto multiple DVD-RW's, since I really didn't want to go through this again later...
I've since had to reinstall my O/S again. But, hey, I have the DVD's right, so no problem? WRONG.
I put all of my songs back onto my computer from the DVD-RWs. The problem now is that iTunes keeps making changes to all of the song info as the songs play -- but the changes are often wrong. For example, it took a bonus disc and relisted all of the songs as if they were the standard disc. It's also been renaming a lot of the songs with that annoying "01", "02", "03", etc... Initially I didn't have any songs that were "numbered" in their track title. Right now I have 1155 songs that iTunes has messed with and decided to add the track number into the title. What gives?
When I right-click on the songs/albums and try to tell iTunes to update the info, it says it can only update for songs that were imported and it tells me to try importing them again. I DID IMPORT THEM ALL ALREADY.
Is there a fix to this? Right now I'm ready to ditch iTunes altogether as it's just making things worse every step of the way.

hi Lana!
hmmmm. let's see if Ruthie's trick works for you:
Ruthie Kalai, "Itunes 5.01 still won't work!!!" #10, 01:50pm Sep 21, 2005 CDT
keep us posted on your progress.
love, b

ITunes organization trouble

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