New iTunes Library Organization: Suggestions, Problems, and Solutions

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iTunes version 9 has a much needed new feature to help clean up the clutter that has built up as Apple added successive new features and functionality to iTunes. In previous versions, musical artists had folders that sat along side container folders for Movies and TV Shows.  This made for a messy folder, and those of us with just the right (wrong?) touch of OCD found it maddening.


But under iTunes 9, you can select "File" --> "Library" --> "Organize Library ..." and choose to "Upgrade to iTunes Media Organization".  This will consolidate all you musical artists under a "Music" folder and leave a clean "iTunes Music" folder.  In my case, only seven folders are now housed in my "iTunes Music" folder:

• Automatically Add to iTunes (more on the new watch folder later)
• Downloads
• Mobile Applications
• Movies
• Music
• Podcasts
• TV Shows

Ah!  Much organization agony released!  Now, if the parent folder was not called "iTunes Music" ...  But I guess they need to save some improvements for version 10 (I mean besides a 64-bit Cocoa rewrite, of course).

I did run into one problem, and there may still be other issues.  After iTunes claimed it was finished with the reorganization of my library, I still had hundreds of individual music artist folders that were not in their proper new home of "Music".  This was driving me nuts, because the option was grayed out, so I could not re-run the "upgrade" (reorganization).

It turns out iTunes moved all the actual music files were properly moved, but iTunes left behind litter in the form of "artwork.jpg" files under many of the album folders and kept the album and artist folders to hold them.  (I'm assuming these files were created by third party used to find album art.)  Once I realized it was not the music files, I cleaned out the artwork.jpg files and their surrounding folders, and everything seems right with the world.

Update:  So, it looks like the reorganization process is basically working, but it is leaving files and folders behind, if it does not know what to do with them.  Anything not mentioned in the Library database, any miscellaneous graphics, and any enclosing folders for said unexpected files.  All left behind in their original cluttered locations.  I guess I understand what is happening, but I wish Apple had included an option to automatically remove the remnants into a folder.  Manually cleaning up after the upgrade/reorganization is a boring pain.

Mad Men Chooses Apple Distribution Instead of TV (in Canada)

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MacNN | Mad Men chooses Apple distribution instead of TV

Direct distribution of a television show via iTunes. Could this be a sign of things to come?

When will companies learn? Standards should be standard.

Sony may start movie download service - Yahoo! News

I think it is quite comical to watch the big content companies flail about trying to wrest power from Apple in music and video.

What seems intuitively obvious to the casual observer is this: all file formats should be based on open standards. If there was a firm standard in place, all these companies could do their own download stores and compete on quality of product and quality of interface.

Without an open standard that can be relied on, only a few distributors will rule the market as they do in the brick and morter market. In this situation, the individual provider stores are doomed to fail, because they do not have all the content and they (usually) have horrible interfaces.

If we had firm standards in place for data files, we could count on software companies to compete on the value their software added. As it stands, the large companies rely heavily on lock-in to hold their customers hostage. The file format is one form of lock-in and the interface is another.

The same goes for media files. Companies like Microsoft and Sony have repeatedly tried to take control of the media file standards with WMV and ATRAC. They do not do this to make a more convenient world for their customers; they do it to lock their customers into their "store", where they effectively would no longer compete on quality or features.

Some good counter examples are JPEG, MP3, and TEXT. These are fairly firm standards that are available and allow numerous products to compete on the quality of their features, functionality, and interfaces. These are healthy markets.

Look at DOC, XLS, WMV, and ATRAC (before it was EOL'ed). These are not healthy markets, even after all the effort that has been invested.

Which makes more sense in the long run?