iTunes renamed and tagged all my files (external hard drive)

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1

Hi all,

Back in 2008, I stored all my music files on an external hard drive. I used iTunes and it asked me if I wanted to allow it to re-organize them or something like that. Anyway, when they were data on the drive, they were all in the right folders and correctly tagged etc. Well some were...some were just named track 01 or something but they were in the correct album folders.

After I allowed iTunes to rape my files, they all became a massive jumbled up mess of folders renamed as track titles and unknown artist files all sorted by track 01 etc.

When I turn on this drive now, all I see are folders named 01 or something ridiculous. Is there a way to undo all of this? I remember iTunes saying it couldn't be undone...but it's almost 10 years later and surely something can be done? Or do I have to try and find each track and rename it? Some of the files had no tagging at all at the time, others have some info such as the album title but the tracks are scattered in different folders and none of it seems to make any sense. I might have to listen to each file and try to figure out what album it's from. It just seems like it's going to take me a year of tagging to finish this.

Has this happened to anyone else and what did you do?

2

Try to get as much tag information out of iTunes as you can.
Perhaps you have to force iTunes to write the information to the tags and not only store it in its database. (Tell iTunes to write V2.3 tags. This should write the information).
Load the files into MP3tag and see with filters and sorting which files still need tagging and which are more or less OK.

To extract further information from the filenames or the folder names, use the function Convert>Filename-Tag.

To create a new folder structure, use the function Convert>Tag-Filename.
(You will most likely be left with empty folders. There are tools around to remove those).

And then you can start with the finishing touches for your files - though this will probably never finish.