This is for Apple folks. Right now, on the external HD I have for all my itunes music, I have my main itunes music folder that I have been using. However, I have two other folders with music I had on other devices and computers. How do I merge all three into one folder without replacing things. Here is the problem- say in one folder I have several Pnk Floyd albums, in another folder I have a couple more, and then in the third folder, another album. I want all the albums in one place. I could cut and paste the specific albums, but that would take forever since there are thousands of bands and albums. I can’t just cut and paste the folders, because then it replaces things. Understand the problem?
Second problem. Assuming I get all three folders merged, how do I get itunes to recognize all the new songs in the folder without creating duplicates in itunes?
Cris (without an H)
Required reading regarding iTunes and network drives.
Lousy Fucking Stupid Piece of Goat Shit iTunes
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
All you need to do is wish it were so and it will be. Apple’s are great like that.
Matthew
File > Library > Organize Library > Consolidate. I believe that leaves you with duplicates, but since they’re all in the iTunes library you can then just delete the old music folders. Get verification before doing so though…I have only done this once, and that was on accident…worked out, though.
Guster
No idea, but I’m always happy to jump in and say that I love my Apple, and have for 15 years, and I fucking hatehatehate itunes, in which nothing is every easy or intuitive. If I wanted to have to think about this shit, I’d have a PC.
Heez
In iTunes preferences, Advanced make sure “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library” is selected. Then just add the new folders and it will, obviously, copy the files into your main iTunes folder. Then go to File -> Display Duplicates and weed out any doubles. Then you can trash the folders.
To weed out the dupes and all before hand you’d need to script it or have something like A Better Finder Rename to do deep file system comparisons.
Steve M.
By now, weren’t we supposed to have anthropomorphic robots with amusing personalities to do all this shit for us?
Mnemosyne
I am very confused. You’re saying that you have the same album with the same songs in two different places and you want to keep both copies? Because iTunes should only overwrite duplicates that are the same song, same band, and same album. If you have, say, two identical versions of “Another One Bites the Dust” because one is on Queen’s Greatest Hits and one is on The Game, you’ll still have both versions after you merge because iTunes goes by album title, not song title.
Cris (without an H)
To actually address your second question, though, I think you can move your files around in the Finder, then update their paths by editing iTunes.xml (which is in your Music/iTunes Music directory). After you update iTunes.xml (which can be tedious, but that’s what regular expressions are for) you’ll need to blank out iTunes.itl. (Make a backup copy of it in another directory.) When you open iTunes, it’ll see the invalid version of iTunes.itl and build a new one based on your xml file.
Warren Terra
Can you just copy the folders into the “Automatically Add To iTunes” folder?
Or is the problem that they’re already in your iTunes library, just in multiple locations?
TBogg
Steve Jobs is the only one who knew how to do this. Bummer, I know…
cleek
@Cris (without an H):
lol.
only Steve Jobs could think of such an elegant system !
(damn your quick fingers, TBogg!)
Tom
Buy an iPhone4s and tell Siri to do it.
trollhattan
@TBogg:
Hah! The only question is whether he’s sucking heavenly donkey balls or satan’s balls?
Warren Terra
@Tom:
I was waiting for this joke. Too proud to make it myself, though.
cjdavis
Yes, itunes will merge all your music directories together for you, it should be pretty straight forward.
But in case it is not, please please please make a backup copy of _everything_ before you try it.
trollhattan
@Tom:
Spousal unit just got hers and it’s full-on war. She hasn’t introduced herself yet to Siri, and I’m not expecting that to go well.
(It’s a lovely thing, far more fun to play with than the HTC it replaced. So why does it suck so bad as a telephone? The old one sounded much, much better–same carrier.)
different-church-lady
Oddly I never seem to have these kinds of problems with my meatspace media…
(Category: unhelpful comments)
Martin
The distinction here is that you don’t want to use the Finder to do this, that will go bad because file managers are fucking stupid.
You want to let iTunes do this directly. Pick the computer running iTunes that you want to be the canonical collection. Then do what Heez says above.
It’ll take all new content you drag into iTunes (or into the Add Automatically to iTunes) folder and copy it properly into the right structure, creating new folders if needed. You’ll wind up with dupes, because iTunes is generous about new content, but they’re not that hard to get rid of, and if you don’t get rid of the dupes, no real harm done anyway.
Martin
@different-church-lady:
4 people in the house, everyone can get any song on any computer/device in any room at any time. And our entire household media collection takes up about 100 cubic inches and in the event of a fire, we’ll lose none of it.
And I can shuffle.
different-church-lady
Does any of this stuff have DRM? That’s a whole nuttha kettle of fish…
Otherwise what I could think of is to drag things from the Finder onto your iTunes Music library. It shouldn’t replace. You can then use “Show Duplicates” to pick off the ones you want to let go of.
What do I know… I don’t use iTunes that much.
Warren Terra
It occurs to me that what you’re really meant to do in our brave new world is upload all that music into the Cloud. And hope that you’ll never be denied access to it.
Tom
@Warren Tera
Luckily I’m not!
Bill E Pilgrim
@John Cole:
1) Open up iTunes
2) Open each of the folders with music in them that you want to merge.
3) Create a duplicate of each of the folders.
4) In the duplicate folder, rename each song with a unique name, similar to but slightly different from the original.
5) Put the whole mess into a paper bag, take it out on the lawn, wave it over your head, and scream, like a chicken.
@TBogg:
I wouldn’t be so sure, I saw a headline today that said “Jobs up, but only slightly”. It gives you a window anyway, before the new religion and so on. Respectfully and RIP SJ.
Kola Noscopy
How about reading the instructions?
different-church-lady
@Martin: 4 people in the house, anyone can take any CD down off the shelf at any time, and none of them have to go on the internet to ask how to deal with it.
Oh, wait, were you proposing a solution where one needn’t actually put one’s feet on the floor and walk into another room? I know such considerations are paramount here in the 21st century.
Tom
@trollhattan
I’ve yet to get mine (upgrading from original droid). Going to wait until I can walk into a store and buy one, whenever that will be.
different-church-lady
@Kola Noscopy: Instructions? Don’t be silly. The computer industry stopped providing instructions back in the late 90s.
different-church-lady
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Hold it there a second… which version of iTunes is he using? That’ll work for 9 and earlier, but for later versions you need to alternate barking like a dog with the screaming.
trollhattan
@Tom:
For a relatively minor upgrade the 4S sure seems well doused in Cupertino magic dust–they can’t come close to keeping up with demand.
I’ll clarify my earlier comment that the sound is bad on my end when she’s speaking (distortion, dropouts, etc.), while the old one was clear and if anything, overly loud. She seems to like the 4S’ sound on her end.
trollhattan
@different-church-lady:
Yup, the 1890s.
Chet
What? Come the fuck on. What are you, “Your Company’s IT Guy”? Jesus, buddy. Know your audience. John Cole posts a question in computer baby talk and you’re telling him to use a regex? I’ve had two years of computer science and even I can’t write a regex without two hours of trial and error.
John, iTunes has a menu option for this: File->Library->Organize Library and then check the “Consolidate Library” option. (In other words, I second Matthew at 3.) All the files that iTunes has in its library, it’ll copy into the iTunes Music Folder if they’re not already there and update their library entries. It shouldn’t result in any duplicate entries in your library, or overwrite any of your existing files. Once you’ve consolidated, you don’t need any of those other files because copies of them have been made.
This is only necessary if your iTunes library already includes all these files. If they’re not already in your library, then make sure the “Copy to iTunes Folder” option is on and just drag them into your library wholesale. Either way, don’t under any circumstances be so foolish as to take the advice of any of these people who are telling you to edit iTunes’ XML files. People who speak computer can do that; you cannot.
cathyx
@Warren Terra: The cloud only holds music you bought from itunes.
Bill E Pilgrim
@different-church-lady: Actually it only works with Season 4. Episode 110.
Cris (without an H)
@cathyx: And music that iTunes Match recognizes, if you wanna pay an annual subscription.
different-church-lady
@Cris (without an H):
Anyone else see the contradiction in those statements?
L. Ron Obama
@Cris (without an H):
Apart from being impossible for mortals, the best part about these ridiculous instructions is that you will lose all your “last played”, “# of times played” and possibly playlist data.
So I hope you were just trying to be funny, although you were not.
khead
@TBogg:
Steve Jobs my ass. He just wanted to top James T. Kirk by adding an extra “oh my (wow)“.
Jobs is no James T. Kirk.
Cuppa Cabana
Speaking of “I have several Pnk Floyd albums,” because of the magic of iTunes and the mooching soshulism known as the New York Public Library, I’ve been adding all the early shit that I could never be arsed to spend 12 bucks on — Meddle, More, Saucerful of Secrets, Obscured by Clouds, and so on. I had no idea how frigging awesome they were if you weren’t listening to one of their mega-mega-albums.
Careful with that axe, Eugene.
Warren Terra
@cathyx:
The iCloud, perhaps. Other cloud options are available, that can accept music uploads. Although I’m not up on the details, and don’t use the cloud myself.
Trooptrap Tripetrope
I was gonna suggest MediaMonkey (it’s all kinds of awesome) in place of iTunes, but apparently MM is not available for OSX.
cathyx
@Cris (without an H): I didn’t know the itunes match has started already.
cackalacka
@TBogg:
And that’s why they say TBogg is the best in the biz.
Cris (without an H)
@cathyx: Yeah you’re right, I thought it rolled out with iCloud. But I haven’t really been paying much attention; I’m generally a late adopter so I probably won’t be using cloud services until they’re totally yesterdaysville.
Jim
There is a application called synctwofolders. Use this to merge the folders in one place, and then point iTunes to that directory. The application gives you the ability to replace or complete directories. You would want to use the complete. That way it will not write over the directory contents.
Bruce Webb
Oy I would say insulting things but since you are so endearingly self deprecating will just give you pass.
If you have albums from thousands of bands and in multiples of albums per band then you have something like a combination 0f 2000 plus albums at maybe 12 songs per album at say 2 minutes each. Which means you will never actually be able to listen to your whole catalog anyway.
Which suggests you should dump that TB of music in favor of n ppropriate index, I mean how many of those songs were actually purchased by you as opposed to being downloaded like a manic squirrel facing a hard winter?
You have blurred the lines between consumer, collector and hoarder here. When you star to measure content in TB rather than MB you might just maybe need some intervention. Even if the audio comes with video.
Now I sympathize, I spent years building up a print book collection of both SF and medieval history on the basis that I might end up some place where my local library couldn’t supply them. But that world vanished a decade ago, apart from sentiment to don’t need to drag print books round and increasingly that applies to e-books and music. The cost of maintaining your catalog not being worth the cost of on-demand. For all categories of content.
I am still shedding books even after 20 years of deaquisition. Because I had a lot of books which I was attached to. And granted an eternal 1TB hard drives ways nothing by comparison. But how many of those song trcks would not be available on demand?
I am a bibliophile and not a music guy, but am THIS close to carrying around the world’s libraries on my cell phone. Absent best sellers that I could buy if I wanted to. Rather than finding ways to merge your folder you might want to embrace the magic of old dos del *.* . (kids at home DO NOT Enter this command on your parents PC at Root level, I am making a point and not a suggestion)