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[tngiloy]

I have spent the last few weeks tagging many of my MC20 files so that they are listed logically. For example, Paul Simon follows Carly Simon and does not follow Paul McCartney.
Today I opened iTunes to make some play lists for my nano. When I looked, many of the albums I had ripped in MC20 had not been exported to iTunes, so rather than cross-checking every album, I opened MC20 AUDIO>Files>select all. Then 'export to itunes'. That worked fine in iTunes. All the albums are now in iTunes.
BUT WHEN I OPENED MC20, WHEN I TRY TO PLAY SOME ALBUMS I NOW GET AN ERROR MESSAGE 'CANNOT FIND FILE. PLEASE CHECK....'.
OR WHEN I OPEN A FILE IT HAS ALL THE SONGS LISTED TWICE. Once under Simon,Paul and once under Paul Simon??

So how do I get this straightened out. Is there a simple way to get rid of all the files I don't want and keep the ones I want, or do I need to go thru all the albums I have tagged and delete the duplicates one at a time.

MC20 seems to make doing simple things harder than they need be.

[JimH]

Check your autoimport settings.  Tools > Import > Autoimport.   Add or remove directories you want MC to watch.  Edit them to limit the file types or to exclude a directory.

[glynor]

iTunes by default, has a setting where it automatically re-organizes your files on disk. I'm on my phone right now so I can't describe it in great detail. But you can Google it. It's called keep my files organized, or something like that.

So what almost certainly happened, is after you imported them into iTunes, it moved every original source file to a new location in your iTunes media folder. This made media center no longer know how to access the files.

EDIT: It is called Keep iTunes Media folder organized:



So, here's what I'm betting happened:

1. You did all of your work in MC.
2. You exported to iTunes.
3. When you opened iTunes to import the XML, it happily imported them, and because the Keep iTunes Media folder organized box of great evil is enabled by default on iTunes...
4. iTunes moved and renamed every single one of your files and put them in its folder the way it wants them to be.

So now, MC can't find the files anymore. They were one place, and now they're gone. This isn't good, but it probably isn't the end of the world.  You will probably need to delete all of the "broken links" (the files that MC thinks are on disk in a certain place, but aren't) and re-import them from where iTunes put them.  If you look at that same dialog I show above, it'll show where iTunes put them.

Use Media Center to Import them:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Import

And turn that option of great evil off in iTunes.

[tngiloy]

JimH- I solved the problem by deleting the MC20 library and then having it again populate its files from D:music, which is where I keep all my music files for iTunes and MC20. It seemed to work, although some of the album cover artwork was missing. Is there a way to force an album cover artwork retrieval in MC20? I could not find it, if there is.

Glynor-
I do have that particular iTunes setting enabled. Seemed like a good idea at the time, especially by the way they describe it. I will disable it the next time I'm on that computer. Thanks.

[blgentry]

You're going to run into some issues with where your music files are stored.  Right now you've got a ton of music in ITunes Music/Music/, with Artist and Album folders below that.  Probably fairly neatly organized.  Though, if I know itunes, you'll have some strange stuff going on for compilation albums.  If you're unlucky, you might have compilation albums split into many, many artist directories.  Not a huge big deal, just messy in my opinion.

Your bigger issue is where to put your new music.  Do you start adding to the folders under Itunes Music?  Or do you maintain a different set of directories that you organize the way you want to?  If so, you'll now have two separate trees of music.  This isn't going to cause you big issues until you do a migration to another disk or another program and you have to try to figure out where all of your music is.

If I was in your situation, I'd use some tool to unify all my music files into one tree *outside* of the itunes folder.  In theory JRiver can move all of your files according to rules you set and make it all neat and organized.  I haven't used it myself and have read some cautions from other people.  Maybe someone else here with more experience will have something to say about the Copy Move and Rename tool being used to move thousands of music files at once.

Just some stuff to think about. Organization is important if you care about your music.  Which you probably do since you are here! 

Brian.