Manage multiple folders add metadata advanced Q

Question

I am not a beginner but iTunes makes me feel like one. I could rant but would rather find a solution and be done with it.
Windows 8 itunes 12
New laptop and fragmented folders full of music on 2 external drives plus lots of newly ripped WAV files on external drive to be imported as MP3.
I am willing to completely remove everything from the laptop and start over if there is a comprehensive method.
This is exasperating to me Im not even sure I can explain it. All advice makes things easy - as long as you let itunes control consolidation of everything and you dont dare move a file around or care about the format. Then you get "what you asked for, but not what you want".
I want all my music into one folder on my laptop, everything in MP3 format, organized in iTunes, so I can use this large library on my portables, and back up easily to its own folder on the external drive, while retaining the formats separately on an external backup. BUT  I dont want to import WAV FLAC etc files and then convert to MP3 and then delete duplicates, although I have found a fast workaround. FURTHERMORE I have ripped a lot of my old vinyl, which is in yet another folder on the external drive in WAV format which I want to import directly as MP3, find all songs on same album, and add info manually .  There is no metadata, only the song name.  I need a way to do this for all xx songs on the same album.  My test import of 3 different albums grouped all the songs together with the same date stamp and I cannot tell which belongs to which.  Can I at least bring them in orderly to select groups for adding info? 
One more thing.  There are at least two locations that are being pointed to:
Path : c:\users\Myname\music\itunes\itunesmusic\   AND in a subfolder
          C:\users\Myname\music\itunes\itunesmusic\ music (which was fresh stuff added)
If I move all the album folders from the second into the first manually, ITunes wont be able to locate them. I want everything in the first location, or a new simpler one I can create.  Thanks for helping the ignorant. There has to be a simple way to accomplish this without a week of manually clicking a mouse.

Answer 1

Some of the things you say you want in your original post are not possible, but there should be a way to add your content to your library and bring it into some kind of order.
iTunes has two settings that define the behaviour when content is added to the library. Enable the menu bar if necessary with Ctrl+B then use Edit > Preferences > Advanced. The Keep... option tells iTunes to rearrange files inside the media folder when tag information changes, or if necessary when adding files to the library that are already inside the media folder. Copy... tells it to make copies of any files that are outside the media folder.
If iTunes copies or moves files added that are in .wav format, then they end up in the Unknown Artist\Unknown Album folder with their original filename, which becomes the track name. If you disable both Keep... and Copy... options you can safely add the content to the library without changing the filepaths. Once that it done you can use a script called TagFromFilename to fill in the details from the path. It expects to find tracks in the following format:
..\<Album Artist>\<Album>\[D-]## <Name>[ - <Artist].<Ext>
where [D-] is an optional leading disc number, and [ - <Artist>] allows for an optionally different artist when the artist isn't the same as the album artist.
Once you have the songs catalogued in iTunes with the correct metadata you can convert to Apple Lossless or AIFF, both of which carry a full tag to preserve the data and are also lossless formats, or you can convert to mp3 at your preferred bitrate. I would suggest you start with your .wav files located outside of the media folder, then any converted files will be created inside it, and it will be easy to remove the links to the originals once the conversions are complete. You can then archive the originals in case you ever need to revisit them, particularly if you are going to convert to mp3 since this is a lossy format.
See the user tip Make a split library portable for some background on the usual layout of an iTunes library, and how to rearrange things if they aren't in the standard form.
tt2