Trouble moving a large amount of files

Hi guys, I wasn't sure whether to put this in the music forum or this one or another one completely. I have all of my music on an external drive, and unfortunately I've let that become very disorganized. All of my music is imported/tagged in iTunes, and I'm trying to select all of my music (about 78 gigs or so) in iTunes and drag it from there into a completely new folder on my external drive. However, each time I do this, the little red bubble that says "+11484" or whatever eventually floats back to iTunes, Finder freezes for 5 minutes or so, and then nothing happens at all. I have no trouble moving one song or even a hundred songs at a time, but that would still take much more time than I'd like. How can I fix this problem?

Thank you in advance!

My advice with that large a move is to do it in terminal. I'm heading off to a meeting though, so if that's a concern I can help with that later.

Alright, thanks! If you or anyone else can help me to do it in Terminal, I'd really appreciate it. I don't know much about that.

Would Terminal be able to do that, even if I'm trying to move something from an iTunes playlist into one folder? I have to move it from iTunes because that's the only place where it's organized, otherwise everything's scattered around.

I still can't figure this out guys! And I've got no idea how to go about it in Terminal. Any point in the right direction would be good! Thanks a lot!

Can you even move them using itunes? I haven't tried yet. Anyone?

Man mv. Probably something like: mv -i sourcepath destinationpath
NOTE: this will delete the original after the copy.

right, but reading the original post he's using iTunes.. which sorts by metadata. I don't think you can move things from iTunes to a Finder window.

Why don't you just set it so that iTunes will organize your music folder? That way everything will be nicely organized into corresponding folders, which you can then easily copy/move to another location.

Dysfunction said:

right, but reading the original post he's using iTunes.. which sorts by metadata. I don't think you can move things from iTunes to a Finder window.

Click to expand...

I don't have any problem moving one or several files from iTunes to a Finder window, but moving more than a few hundred at a time hasn't worked. It worked on my PC once, but the PC is too slow for me to want to try it again.

How would I set iTunes to organize everything? Here's the way I have it set up:

I've got iTunes on the Mac which has a ton of music of my dad's, my sister's, and mine. One day (when I bought my iPod classic) I dragged my entire library from iTunes on my PC into one folder on my external drive so that I could add it to my dad's iTunes library so that I could sync it, since my PC doesn't seem to like that. I made a separate playlist which contains all of my music on the external drive. The external drive is totally messy, unfortunately, because I've gotten a lot more music since adding all of it to that one folder, and I didn't do it in an organized way. How might I be able to tell iTunes to organize everything by folder without messing things up?

Sorry for the huge post :S Thanks again guys!

It was my understanding he wanted to move them from one folder to another on his external drive. mv will do that. If he also wants to sort them while he moves them, maybe using grep in a pipe after the mv? Or before the mv?
Maybe even a Python or Perl script could do it. Not an expert on this but I think there is a limit on how many files Finder can handle at one time. Probably why it chokes when he tries to move them.