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Specifically, a program that will undone the organizational disaster that iTunes did to my music. Anyone know of one, or should I just get started organizing like 15 G by hand?

I don't let iTunes move my files.... what does it do exactly?

It depends on how you have it set up, some people will name their song files, just from the actual file in whatever folder they have it in, but that's not the proper way to do it because mp3 players read ID3 tags (generally), so if you have the option checkmarked in itunes to copy your music to the music folder, then it renames all your files to match your ID3 tag, but only the copied files. If you don't have the option checkmarked it won't actually change anything about your original files. itunes actually makes it really easy to change all your id3 tags, because you can change multiple files at once, as long as you're changing the album/artist/year etc... which saves tons of time. song names need to be changed one by one however.

Well see this is what happened:

I put all of my music on my friend's ipod (not transferred, MOVED). Then, he iPod died. So we had to put it in it's safe mode and move all of it directly off the hard drive. So now I have it all back, but every last bit of organization is gone. It's so horrible.

... :O
That sucks.

Well if I change the information of a song in windows media player, it changes the file name and organizes it and stuff. I'm not sure if thats with all computers or versions or whatever though. I don't know if that really helps either.

Henrietta wrote:Well see this is what happened:

I put all of my music on my friend's ipod (not transferred, MOVED). Then, he iPod died. So we had to put it in it's safe mode and move all of it directly off the hard drive. So now I have it all back, but every last bit of organization is gone. It's so horrible.

Hmmm, well the id3 tags are all still intact so actually you might be able to use iTunes to restore the organization (since as Lando said, apparently there is a setting which will allow it to move all the files and perhaps rename them based off of what the id3 tags say).

Yeah, Cass, just go into itunes preferences, and under the advanced tab there's an option you can checkmark that says "Copy songs to itunes music folder when adding to library."

If that option is checked, you'll get doubles of every song, but if the ID3 tags are still in tact, all of the songs that you drop into itunes will be copied to your itunes music folder, but placed into the proper ARTISTS and ALBUMS folders that the ID3 tags specify which would reorganize everything for you.

Yay! Even though I hate iTunes and took it off my computer, it looks like something good might come from it!

Thanks guys, I love you all!

Does that mean it worked? Or if you haven't tried it yet, let me know what happens!

I haven't tried it yet. I want to in the next few days though.

Ok so I tried to reinstall itunes and it said that itunes could not read the library itf file because it was created by a newer version of itunes.

WTF does that mean?

Um, it sounds like you're trying to install an older version of itunes. It may be that the version you're trying to install was the one that was on there previously, but while it was installed someone downloaded an update for a new version, therefore updating the itunes files to a new version and now that you're trying to install an older version again, it won't work properly because you're attempting to revert to an older version.

What I'd to is make sure you've got the newest version of itunes, if you do, you'll have to delete all remaining itunes files, like this ITF file you're talking about and then do a re-install.

Damn. Ok thanks.