Utterly frustrated with iTunes

FearDark

Need a free alternative to iTunes and what I need more is a way of organising my library of music. When I copy music folders into iTunes and sync with my ipod they are scattered all over my iPod as it arranges them into albums/artists and a lot of my music is compilations from several different artists/albums recorded/downloaded over the last 15 years. It's not a problem on my android devices as there is a tab on the music player to "arrange by folder", I'm just utterly sick of iTunes and I need to find another way to deal with it. My iPod music player is unusable really when there's three songs of an album filed under the album and then another ten filed under "Unknown Artist" it's very frustrating. Is there a way of organising this?

baby and crumble

Sounds to me like your meta data needs to be updated. I have a massive music collection, but I'm anal about keeping the data perfect. So I actually find iTunes great. I can't offer an alternative player or organiser, especially since if your data is haywire, it'll impact how any player deals with it, I would have thought.

FearDark

Been messing around for the last hour or so and found a free program called "MP3 Tag"... It's handy, did a test run and it works, every song in my music library has a band name and a song name but just shows up as "Unknown Artist" in iTunes, I'm beginning the task of replacing all of these with this program and so far it's working, transferred 30 odd albums to the iPod and they're all perfectly named. It will take some time to get through all my albums.

baby and crumble

Yeah it's a pain, but once it's done it's done.

FearDark

baby and crumble wrote: »

Yeah it's a pain, but once it's done it's done.

I'm on day two of sorting the music out folder by folder and the sun is splitting the rocks outside but once I've started it...

jonon9

Have you tried MediaMonkey?

FearDark

jonon9 wrote: »

Have you tried MediaMonkey?

Nope, will download it though. I really need something to keep me organised.

Zcott

Once you've it done its easy to keep on top of for new albums. Worth doing.

Piliger

I love iTunes. When I import music that hasn't been properly meta data'd I don't blame iTunes. I sit down and edit the meta data singly or in groups as a matter of investment. Once done it all comes up beautifully in iTunes from then on.

FearDark

Piliger wrote: »

I love iTunes. When I import music that hasn't been properly meta data'd I don't blame iTunes. I sit down and edit the meta data singly or in groups as a matter of investment. Once done it all comes up beautifully in iTunes from then on.

I'm not blaming itunes for muddling up my collection, I'm blaming it for being a useless program that you need to sort the music on an iPhone/iPod. I have never ever had any trouble sorting music on any android device, always shows up the same as filename/folder as it does in windows...

Piliger

FearDark wrote: »

I'm not blaming itunes for muddling up my collection, I'm blaming it for being a useless program that you need to sort the music on an iPhone/iPod. I have never ever had any trouble sorting music on any android device, always shows up the same as filename/folder as it does in windows...

Well in my personal view because iTunes delivers a superior experience, it requires a little more investment. Android just shovels it up.

brophs

Usually the main culprit (apart from iTunes being an awful piece of software) is the album artist field. Usually you'll find that if those are cleared for an entire album it'll show up in the right order once you have track numbers assigned.

Slideways

Select all the songs in that album, right click and go to find info I think. In there you can tick a box that confirms it's part of a compilation