How to Organize an iTunes Music Folder

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is James Flint, and I'm going to show the different functions that iTunes has that enable you to organize your music folders. So we're going to launch iTunes, and we're going to go up to the iTunes preferences, and I've already been doing this, so I'm a pretty organized person, but you'll see there's these two check boxes under the general tab, the one says keep iTunes music folder organized, and the other says copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to the library. This first one, keep iTunes music folder organized, is going to put all the files in one folder and it's going to have them organized by the artist name, and then all the tracks will be, or the albums will come under the artist's name and then under the album you will find the actual track names. The second option, copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to the library, makes it so that any time you add files from anywhere on your computer, it's going to make an extra copy of those files in the iTunes music folder. That way you have a one stop place for all your music needs. So I'll show you that here in my iTunes, in my music folder, iTunes, iTunes music, you'll see the list here again. It's doing it by the artist first, so if you look under Bob Marley here, or Bob Marley and the Whalers, well, let me try and find someone that has multiple albums. Here under Beck, you'll see that he's got, there's three albums now that are going to all come under Beck, and then if you want to look for an individual track, you select the album name and the individual tracks are listed in there in order. So this is very organized, straight down to all the tracks from an album in order, underneath the album name and then underneath the artist name. This step is highly recommended for keeping your iTunes music folder and all your music organized on your computer. It'll save you a lot of time in the future whether you're backing stuff up, you know storing things on different machines, making a playlist, or you know changing the file names or formats. So it's really important to know how to do, and again it's pretty simple, and that is how you organize your iTunes music folder."