Reorganising My Music folder

I have a few problems with the organisation of my My Music folder, which i use instead of iTunes folder. For example, i have a few compilation albums which i want to re-categorise under the track artist. I wonder how i manually sort this all out. Can i just move AAC or MP3 files around using Windows Explorer, or is there some way of doing that from within iTunes??
thanks, dave

You need to have the 'Keep iTunes Music folder organized' box checked off in your iTunes Preferences. Find it under the 'Advanced' tab in v5.0. You may have to 're-process' those songs/Albums you just tried to get them to reorganize. Any new Albums after you make the change should be moved into your Artists folder sub-structure.
If you would rather have this feature turned off normally, you can do so after re-organizing your Albums out of the 'Compilation' folder.
Edit: Before you try this again, make sure that you make a backup copy of your Library file ('iTunes Library.itl') and possibly your complete music folders if they are organized differently than the standard iTunes method (eg. 'iTunes\iTunes Music\Artist\Album')

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Hi Jen, welcome to discussions
iTunes always manages the music folder in that way (\[artistname]\[albumname]\[title]).
To keep it from splitting up your albums with several different artist, check "part of a compilation" in the info tab (right-click->get info). Now those albums will appear in one folder (\compilations\[albumname]\[title])

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After I imported music of the album "Wings Of Song", by James Galway, from my removable hard disk to "iTunes Music Folder" and had iTunes organized it, I discovered something that's a little bit wierd. All the music I just imported is put under the folder Compilation\Wings of Song. This means that when iTunes organizing the music folder, it unexpectedly "thought" all these music are by the artist Compilation. What is the reason? Could anyone tell me why? Thank you!

The Compilation directory is how iTunes organizes albums that Gracenote (CDDB) considers works of various artists or collections of songs from the same artist, but differing albums (like "Best Of's" or "Greatest Hits").
The CDDB is not always consistent, as some Greatest Hits are marked as compilations and others are not. This really irked me in the beginning as I was wondering why some of my albums went missing. At first I tried to manually reorganize and move the files, but it was cumbersome. I stumbled on the "Compilations" function and it made things much easier.
For instance, if you have a Greatest Hits album of U2 sitting in the Compilations directory and would rather have it under the U2 directory (where I feel it better belongs), you would perform the process outlined below and the album and songs would move to its "improved" location.
That's why you have folders in your Compilations directory. Some you may wish to keep there, some you may want to move to a more appropriate place. This is how. Try moving some of them to their Artist's folder (if you have any that would qualify).
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-- Advanced/General: Keep iTunes Music folder organized (on)
-- Advanced/General: Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library (off) - change it back to 'on' after the song switch, if you want
To move an Album from the Compilations folder after it was imported from a CD (or otherwheres):
-- Highlight the collection of songs on that CD within the main Library
-- Right-click, 'Get Info'
-- Remove the 'Part of Compilation' check-mark - turn it to 'no'
-- Click 'OK'
iTunes will reorganize your PC folder structure, moving the songs from the Compilation folder to their Artist folder.
To defeat a Compilation designation prior to ripping the tracks from a CD, go to 'Get Info' on the CD and make sure that the 'Part of Compilation' box is not checked. This will keep the album under its designated Artist folder.
This is how I keep my music organized. I only want 'true' compilations under the Compilations folder, not some of the Artist's 'Greatest Hits'. You may have other desires.

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To move your iTunes music to an external drive...
1 Quit iTunes.
2 Move the entire iTunes folder including music to
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In point #2 do you mean move the entire Program File folder of iTunes or just the "My Documents" iTunes library folder?
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Reorganising My Music folder

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