[DancingSponge]

I have a huge amount of mp3's (about 100gigs worth) which are all stored in a folder, with sub folders of the artist (about 400) then the album (around 1200 albums). I normally like to listen to my music album at a time, and have playlists for each album that were made under Windows with winamp (.m3u files) which show up with an iTunes icon, but won't play if you double click them.

I don't really want to have to drag 100,000+ songs into the library. How would I manage being able to listen to these albums easily?
Also, I want to keep them in .mp3 format so that they can be played on our other Windows machines.

Is there any mp3 software that runs similar to how WinAmp runs.
I would like to try and see if I can get iTunes to work the way I want it to, but I don't know the software well enough to rethink how to use my mp3 player.

[mduell]

Add the root folder for your music collection to iTunes library (it will scan through and add all your songs). Then you should be able to open one of the playlists and have iTunes play that playlist.

Adding the MP3s to your iTunes Library does not mean you have to convert them to AAC.

[CatOne]

One thing, though -- The FIRST thing you should do is uncheck "keep iTunes folder organized" in the preferences... BEFORE you add the root. Otherwise, iTunes will rename all your songs based on their MP3 tags (and if you're a PC user, and "acquired" these somehow, I'll note the tagging is probably AWFUL)... meaning you will get 100 GB of crud.

But iTunes works great with MP3 files.

[DancingSponge]

Thanks... do I also want to uncheck the 'copy files to music folder when adding to library' button?
I really don't want duplicate copies of these files on my harddrive.

Regarding the 'keep iTunes organized', is that information then taken off the mp3 tags, or from the folder/filename that I have them iin?

Also, does iTunes not read .m3u playlist files?