iTunes sending me crazy

Hi guys

Need some advice on audio players. Have been looking at various players such as Audion but really not sure if any of them are good enough as they all seem a bit fiddly and minor. I gave up on iTunes so long ago because I was using a PC, but I am thinking about using it once again now that I am back on Mac.

But one thing I CAN NOT STAND AND MAKES ME PULL MY HAIR OUT is that if I move or rename a music track or folder, I have to point iTunes to EVERY SINGLE track afterwards. Can't it just find the whole folder and automatically replace the rest of the tracks? It really shouldn't be that hard. Ableton scans directories and replaces missing tracks automatically. This just seems unacceptably sloppy from such a juggernaut of a program. What is up with that? I have a massive library and am constantly reshuffling it (creating new artist directories, compiling label discogs etc) and just can't deal with iTunes being such a drama queen every time I rename a folder. ARGGGHH.

Is there a way to get iTunes to deal? Or is there another program I can use that isn't so annoying?

Also what does it mean when people talk about editing iTunes scripts? What would that allow you to do? Would that allow you to not pull your hair out when the above happens?

Cheers guys, any help at all appreciated.

PS I have read through the iTunes external hard drive tutorials etc as I am keeping music on an external drive, but none of these say anything about moving tracks etc.

Please help!

i wish i could help. i'm having a bit of a media player conundrum like you too. itunes was one of the couple things that i just did not take to when i moved to a mac as my primary machine.

i'm sure there is a way to 'point' itunes at an external drive. other than that, i'm guessing the more solidly apple-centric members woukld say you're fighting the software too much. just let itunes do it's thing, edit tracks via itunes and all that. though i know how hard that control is to relinquish. i keep all of my music manually managed on my macbook, with a backup on an external HD. then i drag things into itunes, vlc, or media rage when i want to play them.

eric said:

i wish i could help. i'm having a bit of a media player conundrum like you too. itunes was one of the couple things that i just did not take to when i moved to a mac as my primary machine.

i'm sure there is a way to 'point' itunes at an external drive. other than that, i'm guessing the more solidly apple-centric members woukld say you're fighting the software too much. just let itunes do it's thing, edit tracks via itunes and all that. though i know how hard that control is to relinquish. i keep all of my music manually managed on my macbook, with a backup on an external HD. then i drag things into itunes, vlc, or media rage when i want to play them.

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Thanks for the reply eric. Not a problem getting iTunes to read music off my hard drive, but whether they are on a hard drive or not, I can not move tracks around (collect several releases from a genre or misc folder to create a new artist folder, for example) without iTunes losing track and having to be pointed to each and every one.

I would love not to fight the software! But when I DJ using Ableton I access my music from the folders and they have to be organised as such - organising them in iTunes will do nothing for me because when I go to load up on music for a performance they will still be in chaos, folder-wise.

If I could establish a methodology for organising the folders that meant nothing ever had to be moved, that would solve the problem, but that comes with its own difficulties I won't go into now! Or I can just only play the music through iTunes when I listen to it as you mention, which is what I've been doing since I got a Mac. But I want to able to access my library through a nice player as it seems so far away and sterile in all these folders.

Sigh.