Hi all - Please excuse what may appear to be a rather stupid question to some. I have an i-Pod on which I have about 2000 tracks stored, collected over the last year or so. For whatever reason, I originally elected NOT to have i-Tunes organise my music, and have most of the tracks stored alphabetically directly in the 'i-Tunes Music' folder by artist name, album name and track title e.g. Barry White - The Collection [UK] - Walking In The Rain (With The One I Love.m4a). In other words, I dragged the tracks from their parent folders (In this case it would have been from a folder titled 'The Collection [UK]' which in turn would have been in a folder called 'Barry White') into the main i-Tunes folder).

I believed that it would be easier to back up all my tracks onto an external HDD doing it this way, but now think this was not such a good idea, after all, and would like to let i-Tunes sort it out in future.

My question is, if I now elect to let i-Tunes take control, what is the likely outcome for my existing library? Is it too much to hope for that everything will be sorted out as if I hadn't interferred in the first place, or do I run the risk of my library turning into an unholy mess that will takes hours of sorting out before I can use it again?

If anyone has done this themselves I would be most gratefull if you could share your experience - good or bad! - with me!

Many thanks.

Malc

It's best to have iTunes organise your music for you, makes your life a lot easier.

Hi Mystic Eddie - Yes, that's the conclusion I've come to, but I don't want to spend hours re-assembling play lists etc., filling up my HDD with multiple copies and having to sort 2000+ tracks out. If that is what is likely to happen if I 'tick the box' now I will wait until I have a week off work rather than do it right now! Anyone have any experience of doing what I'm proposing to do?

It shouldn't affect your playlists. All it will do is organise the tracks into folders for albums, artists, compilations etc. All the music will be rearranged so you won't have to do anything to get it working again.

Is there not some sort of option to only change anything in the iTunes view as well? ie. leave the actual file/folder structure alone.

That way you'll get the best of both worlds ..... your files/folder will still be what you called them and where you put them but you can view them in a completely different structure in iTunes.

I'd use Media Monkey to do the re-organising. It's a lot more flexible than I-Tunes. Free to download.

Definitely. Makes life much easier. I also just have it copy music to the iTunes library, then I delete the original.

Thats what I use too. (I don't have an iPod .... but the wife does)

Far better piece of kit in my opinion. You can use it to sync to an iPod too ..... as the wife now does. iTunes has been rendered redundant in our house!

I have iTunes organise my music for me. It means that I don't have to think about folders, file structures etc. I just pop a CD in my MacBook, it rips it, files it and then I sync it onto my iPod.

Couldn't be easier.

Does Media Monkey stream to Airport Expresses?

Thanks for the input, people! Will look at Media Monkey in the New Year, as it sounds a very versatile piece of kit. Regarding i-Tunes, though, am I running ANY risk at all of losing/corrupting any data or playlists by 'ticking the box' and letting it do its own thing?

Sorry if I seem a bit stoopid or paronoid - please bear with me and humour an old(ish) man. I went through a traumatic time once before when BOTH my HDD's failed and I lost i-Tunes and the back-up library! (On that occasion Copy-Pod proved an excellent purchase!)