Author Topic: Importing Playlists within Playlist Folders  (Read 934 times)

fbl

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 1
I'm new to both MusicBee and to Windows 10, so I hope you'll pardon what might appear to be an obvious question.

I have a rather extensive library of music and audio-books which I currently access through iTunes software on a Mac. I've pretty well neutered all of iTunes' automated functions, so that it functions as a simple player. I do not own any portable devices that would require iTunes to manage file transfers, etc. To date, each new album of files has been entered manually by dropping the files from a system window to the newly created playlist. From there, it essentially acts as a dumb player, and that's how I like it.

I hate most of iTunes' display options, so I have chosen to show everything as Music, displayed in the "as Songs" mode, even Audio-books. For the latter, I will open the Options to enable the "resume play" and "skip when shuffling" settings which are especially helpful when an audio-book is contained within a single large file.

All of my collection is contained within one "Music" folder on an external hard drive. Within that, I have organized my collection into individual folders by Artist name, with individual sub-folders in each one for each album.

In iTunes, I have created a Playlist Folder for each Artist, and within each, individual Playlists for each album. In this way, the iTunes Playlist structure mirrors the file structure. I have copied the iTunes playlist registry (if that's the correct word) for MusicBee importing. In addition, on my Win10 machine, I have installed a utility which allows it to read from and write to the Mac formatted HFS+ file format, so MusicBee can see my existing collection. I'd like to maintain this structure of Playlist Folders holding one Playlist per Album, when I import everything to MusicBee.

My Win10 machine is an HP mini-tower, with Win10 Pro 64 bit version 1803. I've installed MusicBee and run it, first making a new "Library" and then attempting to import my iTunes data. However, this does not result in an organized list of Artists as Playlist Folders, with albums as Playlists within each one, but rather it generated a large number of Playlist files (.m3u) located just inside my current "Music" folder, one for each album without any artist identification in the file names - in other words, a big, unwieldy list of random albums.

How can I import my iTunes library in such a way that MusicBee creates the necessary Playlist Folder and File structure I'm currently using in iTunes? I'd hate to have to import each album one by one, just to maintain the organizing hierarchy I'm used to. If there is a tutorial somewhere that I've missed, I'd be grateful for being pointed to it. Thanks in advance.