iTunes organising misery

To both:

I've never had iTunes organize my music for me. I tell it what main directory all my tracks are in - that directory is then subdivided into Artistname - Albumname subdirectories (ie "The Police - Message in a Box (Disc 1)"). But, for compilations I just use the album name, so it would be something like "Plea for Peace Vol II" and when I look in iTunes it would allow me to select the album or artists based on the ID3 tags.

*If you plan to own an iPod for a while invest your time in getting your ID3 tags straight. I was stubborn about this for a while, but I did it about a month ago and I'm much less frustrated with organizing my music now that everything is straight.*

My educated guess would be that the way you need to reorganize your music back the way you had it is manually. Drag, drop, cut, paste - whatever it takes.

You may be able to undo some of the damage using RealPlayer 10.5. Like iTunes, it can organize your music, but it gives you a choice of the structure.

Anybody know of any good automated ID3 tag editor's/modifyers/"try to figure out song/album and add to ID3 tag"...?

for windows that is..

Thanks,
Stefan

"As for compilations:
Right click a file and press 'show info'
Check 'part of a compilation' this way it will group it in compilations/album/"

Unfortunately it still shows all the various artists in your itunes which makes the list much longer to scroll through. I wish there was an option to put them all under a compilations artists or something.

Stefan, I use tagscanner. The latest version has a great utility that will go to the web to try to match the files in a particular folder to an album. It's a little tricky to figure out at first but well worth it once you get it.

Originally posted by Kiros
"Unfortunately it still shows all the various artists in your itunes which makes the list much longer to scroll through. I wish there was an option to put them all under a compilations artists or something. "

There is.
edit - preferences - general - 'group compilations when browsing'
Yup, that works great! Darn shame it doesn't work on the iPod though :(

I had this same query after I let iTunes organise my ripped CD's automatically and it put disc one of a "Best of" CD in the artist folder and disc two in the compilation folder. It also labeled disc one and two differently. I wasn't sure if I could just manually move them because iTunes and iPod keeps all details in a DB. And you can't really. If you move the files iTunes will report the files are for the songs are missing so you need to clear them from iTunes and re-add the songs.

If someone knows an easier way, please let me know.