Re: WARNING!: iTunes reorganised and renamed my MP3s

Alex.
Thank you for your kind advice:
"You realise it does ask you when you start it first if you want it to
manage your music? You shouldn't blindly click Yes to things you dont
understand."

However, I'm afraid you are wrong. There is no such message or choice when
installing iTunes on XP.
The only things you are asked are if you want to install short cuts, use
iTunes as your defualt music player or use QuickTime to play video files.
After you have performed the required reboot (why?) you are presented with
one other choice, whether you want iTunes to automatically update your iPod
when you connect it.
After this you can add a folder to your library from the Files menu. Then
iTunes will blithely rename all the files in that directory and re-organise
them for you. No warning whasoever. Judging by the Apple forums many people
do exactly that are are then very angry to find their entire music
collection has been screwed up. It seems I was lucky in that I did less than
13gb and all my tags are correct.

To the others who replied. Thank you very much. I did look a bit further
after my unfortunate incident and found that i could point iTunes to my
music directory and stop it organising my files... however... when I did
this... I found that the next time I connected my iTunes created a duplicate
set of MP3s on my iPod, giving me two of every song (but with different
titles).

I have also since been warned that iTunes does not spread all the files
across (say) 19 directories as does EPhpod but sticks them all in one or two
directories.. which apparently really slows down accessing the songs if you
have a large collection an iPod with a big disk. I cannot verify this
though.

I do think that Apple have not really taken into account that IBM users tend
to have more intimate knowledge of their machines' files (and file names)
and directories, whereas Mac users don't so much. IBM users are a bit more
"under the hood".
the default action for PC users ought to be that iTunes does not change the
files. At the very least there ought to be a big pop up warning before it
does!

Simon
Brighton UK




-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Stapleton [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 18 October 2003 16:54
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ephpod] WARNING!: iTunes reorganised and renamed my MP3s


On Sat, 2003-10-18 at 06:35, Simon Turner wrote:
> I've just uninstalled iTunes after it reorganised and renamed all my
MP3's,
> creating artists folders (my folders are named "artist - album", naming
> tracks form just their title (my tracks are named "artist - album -
> trackNo - title") and really screwing up compilation albums. Luckily all
of
> my MP3s are correctly tagged so I used a great little tagging plug-in for
> Winamp 2 (EZ-Playlist) to name them all back to my chosen convention. As
> iTunes seemed to stop importing my MP3s at about 13gb (rather than doing
all
> 80gb!) this did not take as long as it could.
>
> But I am really miffed with Apple... especially as iTunes DOES NOT WARN
YOU
> IT IS GOING TO RENAME YOUR FILES.
>
> Grrrrr...
>
> Ephod is great.
>









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