i tunes question

how do i tell itunes where to look for songs? I have a backup folder on a second hard drive and it keeps pulling all those songs up as well, so now i have doubles on itunes. i cant seem to find it.

 

It was a pain in the but to figure out how itunes actually worked but here is what you do.

Consolidate your library into the itunes folder. Once that is done you can delete songs from your hard drive directly from itunes. It makes the organization much easier. Songs are placed into arists folders and their albums are sub folders.

 

but how do i tell it to only look in, say, itunes folder for songs and no other folders?

 

and, is it better in the end to keep your music organized into folders via artist, or just throw every mp3 into one big folder?

 

Well first off how large is your music library i.,e how many songs???

I used to have all my music in one large folder in alphabetical name by "file name" because I had basic mp3 player. Well when I got my ipod I had to change everything and it was for the better. On an mp3 file they have options to add info about artist, album, song title, and genre plus more. If you have all that info avaialbe for your songs the itunes library will automatically sort them by artist for you and it is much much easier to keep it like that on your hard drive. Once itunes sorts it u can delete the songs from the other destination because those are then the duplicates. Everything will be consolidated in your itunes folder on your hard drive and u can control it directly through itunes.

Now as far as selecting where it should look, go to file_ add to library then you should be able to just pick the folder with all your music.

 

i had to move them all to the itunes folder. makes it a lot easier to delete duplicates. if you delete the song from a different folder through itunes it wont delete the files from the folder it looks like. just deleted all the songs from itunes and re-found one folder. now i get to sort through 1800 songs. lot of duplicates with only telling it to look in one folder for songs i wont end up with 40 of the same songs because i keep a couple duplicates on multiple hard drives.

then the fun task of converting my cds. yay.

 

If a song is in a different folder than the itunes folder, then when u delete it in itunes it only deletes it from itunes player. If you have it in the itunes folder and delete it, the program will ask you to keep the file or delete it from the hard drive. Also you can go to the "view" menu and it will show u any duplicates. If they are all in your itunes folder then u can just select one of each duplicate and delete them permanately.

 

Don't allow itunes to organize your music.....

Do everything manually. My husband and I have two computers and multiple external hard drives/network. All our music is in one of the external hard drives and both our computers/itunes is directed to look there. Both computers & laptop are on a network that all can access one music library.

It's become sooo much easier to organize the music ourselves - then letting itunes do it. We can add/remove and re-organize if necessary. You just drag/drop the tunes into your library.