I’ve never understood the philosophy behind many of Apple’s decisions… specifically, default settings within their applications. Take iTunes as an example: by default it’s not set to organize your Library at all. So what?
If you happen to be a user who downloads a lot of content, maybe from Apple, maybe from “other” places… it’s pretty likely that you have music strewn throughout your hard drive and you don’t even know it. With its default settings, iTunes keeps all songs in their original folders. It doesn’t actually move them to your Library folder like you thought. I’ve had many customers ask my why their music won’t play and why they have little exclamation points next to their songs in iTunes. The simple answer: they no longer have any music. How? They deleted the files out of the Downloads (or something similar) folder and didn’t realize it was going to cause problems.
Let’s fix that.
As you can see in the picture above, you can find the Organize Library feature by going to File -> Library -> Organize Library. Clicking that will pull up this window:
Check both boxes as you’re able and it’ll automatically organize your music into one location AND continue to do so in the future. Anything you play with iTunes with be copied into the proper folder. This will, however, leave you with duplicates: it doesn’t actually delete the original file, it just copies it and tells iTunes to reference the new file in the organized folder. You’re now on your way to better organization and less headaches in the future! So, why isn’t this the default setting for iTunes? We may never know.
RMMR will be writing more How-To’s in the future as we come across topics that we think you should know about. If you have a suggestion that you think would make a good article, just send us an email or tweet it to @rmmrdenver.
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