Music on my PC

[A8_Tony]

Hi guys, I thought I'd throw in this thread as I know many of us use MMI with HDD, or SD cards.

Once upon a time I had a nicely organised music list, that was ordered by artist (including various artists compilations) then album...worked a treat.

One bright and cheerful day, along came iTunes, and ruined the whole feckin' lot, but reorganising based on artist, then album. No compilations anymore they were spread far and wide across the terrabytes of space within my PC...this brought thunderous clouds across the A8_Tony household.

So now we look for a solution. Is there a tool out there that will reorganise the physical files on my PC such that they are organised by artist/album, including compilations?......maybe the solution is to organise by album then artist, as this should achieve most of what I want, but I would like to be able to have:

Artist (single artist albums)
- Album 1
- Album 2
Various Artist
- Album 1
- Album 2

Rather than:
Artist
- Artist Album 1
- Artist Album 2
- Compilation Album 1
-- Artist Track #

Thanks in advance

[Adrian E]

In iTunes I have a compilation folder at artist level which stops compilations getting spread everywhere

[PsYcHe]

WinAmp

[A8_Tony]

Originally Posted by PsYcHe

WinAmp

Downloaded, and even bought, this, but can't seem to see anything that will allow me to move files about?

[PsYcHe]

check the media sync options, should be able to sort it when it copies it to the hdd.

[tonupkid]

I created folders from A - Z
Then bunged everything in the appropriate letter (by artist)

Once in a while I like to use random/shuffle but the MMI didn't seem able to handle this across the entire collection, just whatever album is currently selected. Pants. So...

I created a playlist of everything on the HDD, then when I want to take pot luck, I select that playlist and activate shuffle. Works perfectly

[limoncello]

The shuffle seems to work dependant on what folder you are in at the time

I have my folders seperated between

> Girlfriend
> Artist A - D, E - H, etc
> Artist
> Album Name
> Tracks


>Mine
> Artist A - D, E - H, etc
> Artist
> Album Name
> Tracks

if you play a track under my folders, then hit shuffle, it will play ony tracks under mine, similiarly if you shuffle when already in an artist folder it would shuffle just these. if you do it from the root it would shuffle all tracks, if your in a playlist it shuffles the playlist.

[mannyo]

its easy, in iTunes the default option is to show everything using track artist. Simply change the setting to use Album artist instead, and assuming your albums are correctly tagged then the compilations will be grouped together again.

if the album artist is already selected then the issue is poor tagging of the files, and this will just need to be corrected using something like tag and rename.

[christhompson]

I'm not an iTunes fan, but as Mannyo, the secret is in ensuring that all artists, albums and tracks are correct, album sleeves also. Then you can sort - quite powerfully - within iTunes. I have a large-ish music collection [110Gb] and it was in all sorts of a mess. I used TuneUp [tuneup.com] which laboriously did catalogue the whole lot. It took some days, setting it off overnight and checking the suggestions the next morning. It offers certain matches and matches it 'feels pretty good about' for you to review. I accepted everything and now when I find the odd mistake, correct it then.