1) PC with Windows 7
2) iTunes v10.4
3) assorted music files (mp3, m4a, wav)
4) iPhone 3 (yeah I know….. old)
My problems:
1) Very messy music files. Some date back to Napster days, so I have a bunch of “Track 01”, unknown artists, etc. I also have oodles of duplicates sitting in my iTunes library.
2) I HATE iTunes and I don’t understand it (could be an attitude problem). My music is organized into folders that make sense to me, but in iTunes it is all lumped into one huge, messy library. Even the few songs I had on my phone had duplicates until I managed to wipe them all off today.
3) I am scared to delete or even really change much in iTunes because I don’t understand if iTunes just points to the files, or if they actually ARE the files, i.e. if I delete stuff, do I only delete a library file or the real thing on my computer?
My plea:
1) Can you please teach me or send me to a good article/tutorial that explains how to reorganize the whole mess properly? I haven’t found any good ones so far.
2) I saw there are plug-ins meant to sort out music files, do you know of a GOOD one? I’m willing to pay a small amount of money for it, as long as it works.
I am looking forward to the wisdom….. thanks for reading and helping
If you hate iTunes, then why use it? The only reason I ever used that overgrown bloatware was to buy music, before Amazon had their MP3 store. I don't have an ipod, so don't need it for syncing either.
I use a logical folder structure like yourself, and just drag and drop the music into VLC media player. If you want something more iTunes-like, SongBird is a good choice, and it is free. (Oh, look they have it for Android now!)
over 60,000 songs and it hasnt missed a beat yet ;)
I live by it.
That is good to hear.... I saw that one, but was hoping to hear from some actual users.
Do I need to spend $40 for the bundle (only good for a year, anyway), or will the $20 be enough (just the "cleaning" part)?
I was fine with the $20 version, I also had 60,000 songs. I just worked through them slowly - as it does like to miss. As for organizing, I (OCD as I am), went through and made sure all my music had the genre organized correctly, and then I used MediaMonkey (another player, very much like winamp), to organize my library by / genre / Artist / year / Album Name
I would then import the tracks (I dual boot OSX and Win7) where I would have Itunes (now Songbird) look at, but NOT organize (it's in the preferences) my files.
I've found over the years that Itunes is crap, and not going to get any better anytime soon. if you can figure out another program, ((winamp, songbird, media monkey)), they all perform much, much better than Itunes.
James, I love the idea of using a program other than iTunes to organize/keep my music, but I don't understand how I can still synchronize with my phone and iPad that way.
