[dreamBweaver]

I used my iPod in Windows formatting in Disk mode to transfer my music collection to my new PowerBook. The thing is, I had some mpeg, avi, and quicktime music videos that were in the same directories as my music when I copied them to the iPod. When I put all these files on my laptop's HD and ran iTunes it sorted all music out but put the music videos into the Unknown Album folder.

I want to know how I can get iTunes to organize my music videos and keep them in my iTunes library in the same folders as the artists. It'd be a pain to move the music videos to a new place, like My Movies, because the filenames are in "Song.MPEG" format and don't have the artist names or genre.

As a newbie, I'd like to better understand how a Mac's great software can manage my multimedia collection. Thanks.

[Mastrap]

I'm a bit confused by your question. iTunes doesn't play videos, so keeping them in your music folder doesn't make sense.

Movies are generally played in QuickTime. There is a 'movies' folder in your /user/ directory.

[dreamBweaver]

I'm really asking about folder structure and organization. Right now I don't see a way to transition from how I organized the multimedia on my PC to getting it to my Mac. I have a mix of audio and video - mp3s, music videos, trailers. I have 3 big directories on this windows HD: Movies, TV, and Music. Inside each, seperate folders for each show or artist or movie. And inside those folders, all the files I have are together - e.g. an MP3 song and an AVI music video. BTW, I keep soundtracks in the "Movies" folder so there's MP3s in there too and the same for TV.
So my problem occurs when I copy a folder, like Music, to my Mac and run iTunes to import the music from that folder. The music video files and other stuff gets moved around by iTunes away from the folder it used to be in. Stuff iTunes doesn't recognize, like music vids, are moved to Unknown Album in the iTunes library. I want iTunes to ignore the video files and other stuff and just import my MP3s.
How can I also organize my video files supposing iTunes manages to ignore them and leaves them as I've already organized them? There's no program I know like iTunes for video that can do the Jukebox thing. Anybody know one? I'd sure like it if that program also automatically organized my video files or else my only solution with all these music videos is to manually play them in quicktime and keep them organized myself in the My Movies folder.

[geekwagon]

What you might want to do is to turn off "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder" in your iTunes preferences. What that would allow you to do is to leave all your files organized in some way that makes sense to you, anywhere on your hardrive or network. iTunes will just make a database out of them, but won't actually try to move them around. In this case, it will just ignore any files that it doesn't know how to handle, but you will still get the full functionality of iTunes (iTunes works the exact same way whether you allow it to keep your music organized or not.)

I do this to keep my actual files on a network server so that many different machines in my house can easily access them. The only tricky thing to remember is that when you import something from a CD, it will end up in your music folder, so you have to manually copy it out into your ACTUAL music folder with your other files.

Hope this helps.