Library Locating Files

Question

Hi there,
I recently reformatted my HDD but I backed up my library of music onto an external beforehand. I looked around google and found out that by consilidating my files, it would be the easiest way to export and import my library of music and playlists. Now, after transferring all my files over and installing iTunes, I was surprised to see that my whole library was already here (The magic of consilidating I guess).
However, I know that by consilidating the files, iTunes has pretty much created duplicates of the songs in my library in the \iTunes\iTunes Media\Music folder, which pretty much eats up 2x the space of my HDD.
My issue is that, my new library's music are all located in the \iTunes\iTunes Media\Music directory, rather than C:\Users\namehere\Music (Which was how my old library, before reformatting my HDD, was like). It's not that big of an issue, but I'd like to delete the files in the \iTunes\iTunes Media\Music to save HDD space, and relocate all my files to my C:\Users\namehere\Music directory. Is there any possible way for iTunes to magically relocate my songs for me?
I've tried a few methods to do this (Note that I made backups of both my music library and the iTunes media directory just in case):
1) Deleting the iTunes Media directory, and tried to relocate 1 song, and have iTunes work its magic on relocating all the other songs - Unfortunately, this didn't lead to anything at all, and iTunes only located 1 song at a time.
2) Deleting the iTunes Media directory once again, however this time I used the iTunes FindTracks script by selecting all my songs and running the script - Unfortunately, this only worked for a few songs that were located in the same folder.
Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Blade-X wrote:
I understand that generally it's best to put all my files inside the iTunes Media folder. However, I personally like to sort my music differently
I manually lay out my media (e.g. longer filenames than iTunes makes, separate folders for certain genres, artists split into A-Z subfolders, "The Beatles" as "B\Beatles, The" etc.), but inside the iTunes Media folder and with the general breakdown of media types. This makes it easy to move my library between computers, backup etc.
not to mention that I don't particularly place all my music into iTunes, only the ones I want to place into my iPod.
I'd still import everything into iTunes and manage that with playlists, but each to their own.
If you were referring to my FindTracks script earlier it is more flexible than the automatic feature in iTunes but is still really aimed at locating tracks arranged within a top-level media folder by artist and album. It might be possible to tweak it for your structure if it is well defined by tag properties.
tt2