Thread: software for sorting music ? especially for itunes

I know this is a very long shot, but is there a way to just get all my music in my itunes or in my windows music folders to be sorted by genre ?? my itunes library got deleted from my ipod and it will be a huge pain to sort out 3 years of accumulated playlists from a 22+ GB music folder .. better yet, is there an easier way to make ipod playlists than the simple add folder / drag and drop, theres no way i want to spend my summer doing such a colossal task .. maybe apple already has a software like that ? any help will be appreciated I just gave up on restoring my playlists after 2 days of working on it . thanks in advance

Im not sure if I get this. You wanna put all of your music into your itunes again, or? The genre sorting is done by itunes itself, so no need there.

I think what he wants is to sort his music folder (in explorer, not itunes) into genres.
So instead of the usual "My Music/Artist/Album/song.mp3" method of sorting music, he wants to use "My Music/Genre/Artist/Album/song.mp3".

I can see why he might think that is a tidier method of organising the folder, but it will make it harder to find an album unless you can remember the genre of every album you own, not to mention that some artists (and even albums) span different genres, so its counter productive and its better to just let you choosen media player do it for you.

@hella: Your best bet is to just add the folder into itunes ("File > add folder" I think), if the albums are named correctly I think you can get itunes to find and add all the correct album information automatically (I think the option is available if you right click the album, by default I think itunes will automatically organise your music folder as well). To organise music by genre, bring up your library (called library in the left pane) and right click one of the column headers (Track number, title, album artist, rating, etc...) from the list you should be able to tick the box next to genre, this will display the genre column which you can then drag to any possition you like.

As for creating playlists easier, click "File > create smart playlist" from there you can create playlists that will automatically update when any music you have meets certain definable criteria. For example if you created a playlist with the criteria "genre - equal to - Rock", anytime you add any music to your computer that has the genre "Rock", it will automatically be added to that playlist. You can also set multiple criteria, like "[genre: rock] and [genre: alternative] not [artist: Third Eye Blind]"

Hope that helps, forgive me if anything I've said is wrong, but I use WMP as my media player.

Thank you for you replies. What I meant was a software that would already know the song and its matching genres, since a lot of my songs dont have genres. It would be really painful to go through them and look up on the internet what artist and what genre they all belong to. Also, i wanted genres because when i add songs in itunes playlists , songs take up space(mine's 30 GB) and if they are already added by the "add folder" option(being 22GB they take most of the space), songs in the itunes music area not sorted out and i have to go through them/ search and still look for songs to add them to my ipod playlist so that when it is disconnected they can be used. I used the drag-and-drop method all this time to get songs to my ipod playlists instead of getting them into my itunes library first...so my itunes library would be empty most of the time and the ipod playlists would contain all the songs....

@Raszsagal... i would have to type in to itunes what genre they are because they are not all saved with the songs(either in folders which are sorted mostly by artist and mixed genre/and some of my music files dont have the info saved with them) and also because they sometimes dont show up on itunes.

@98baile ...thanks for the tips, i dont use wmp much so dont know too much about it.

iTunes saves the genre and other information to the IDv3 tags of your MP3 files. Since you previously used iTunes, the genre information should already be stored in your MP3 files. You don't need to alter your folder structure, just add them back into iTunes again and everything should be fine.

hi ....i tried putting music in itunes first(music), ....and then tried putting them separately in ipod playlist, the songs genre/names/artists for some/a lot dont show up and the itunes is updated .... anyway, if someone figures what the problem is let me know, thanks for all your help.

iTunes will only be able to provide info for albums it recognises. The best thing to do is search for the album in the store and make sure you have the correct album artist and title.