Create a playlist in iTunes based on a hard drive folder

Question

I'd like to be able to base playlists in iTunes on a folder on my hard drive.

For example, say I have this directory structure:

C:\MP3s\Doctor Who Music
C:\MP3s\Star Wars Music

Importing all those MP3s into iTunes is really simple - at the bare bones version you can just drag the MP3 folder into the iTunes window and it does the rest.

But, having done that, what I'd like to be able to do is point iTunes at each of those directories and have it turn them into their own playlists, so I end up with a Doctor Who Music and a Star Wars Music playlist based on the MP3s locations on the hard drive.

Does iTunes have a way to do this, or is there a way to trick it into this with some other program?

(I'm on Windows, but I'm sure Mac users would also appreciate answers to this as well.)

Answer 1

Its really simple with iTunes 9. iTunes 9 has a Playlist Folder in itself. All you have to do is drag a particular folder in a particular location onto the playlist pane. It will create an entire playlist based on files only in that particular folder. CHEERS!

Answer 2

If you make an empty playlist and then drag the folder from the harddrive over that playlist, it will load all that music in that playlist.

Answer 3

In iTunes you may be able to create a SmartPlaylist that filters on Album or Artist. There doesn't appear to be a way to use the folder to filter the list.

Answer 4

I had the same problem and didn't find a way to solve it in internet. So I decided to write a simple app that help us to re-create our folder lists 'mp3s' into iTunes. It's a simple program written in delphi, here is the link on how to use it and here the link directly to the (not installing) app.

Answer 5

Use The GodFather to change the comments field of a song to the folder name. You can then create a dynamic playlist in iTunes that evaluates the information of the comments field.

Downside: before you add new songs to iTunes you have to do this step. Perhaps you can do this with scripting in The GodFather or with Visual Basic and iTunes directly.

Answer 6

Aha, found a solution.

iTunes doesn't seem to be able to do this, but WinAMP will.

So, enqueue all the MP3s in question in WinAMP (generally, the easy way is to right-click on the folder itself and choose "Enqueue in Winamp".) Save the resulting playlist as an M3U.

Create a new (and empty) playlist in iTunes.

Drag the M3U from Windows Explorer into the empty playlist and viola.

There is one catch - save the M3U in the same folder as the music files - otherwise WinAMP will put relative paths in the M3U rather than just the file names, and this will cause iTunes to think these are new files, even if you've already imported them. If the M3U doesn't have paths, just the file names, iTunes will recognize which files it already has imported and will act accordingly.

Answer 7

In OS X you can write a AppleScript to do what you want, e.g. my DiskHierarcyToItunes you can find at http://vladalexa.com/scripts/applescript/itunes/ Possibly you could do this on a mac then export that library to iTunes on windows.