Stopping Vista organising my MP3's into folders

Hi - I wonder if anyone can help me.

Last year I bought a new PC with Vista. I had a music folder with about
3,000 MP3's in it, the tracks just being listed alphabetically, by artist.
When I copied this folder to my new PC, Vista organised all the tracks into
folders according to the artist. This means that instead of having a folder
full of tracks, all separate, they're now in a huge number of folders,
which I have to open to try and find the track I want. It was MUCH easier
just to have a plain long list of tracks organised by artist, and NOT in
separate folders.

If anyone could help me get my tracks back to being organised the way they
were, I'd be extremely grateful.

Fervently hoping someone can help.

Best wishes,

Kevin

Kevin Heneghan wrote:
> Hi - I wonder if anyone can help me.
>
> Last year I bought a new PC with Vista. I had a music folder with about
> 3,000 MP3's in it, the tracks just being listed alphabetically, by artist.
> When I copied this folder to my new PC, Vista organised all the tracks into
> folders according to the artist. This means that instead of having a
> folder
> full of tracks, all separate, they're now in a huge number of folders,
> which I have to open to try and find the track I want. It was MUCH easier
> just to have a plain long list of tracks organised by artist, and NOT in
> separate folders.
>
> If anyone could help me get my tracks back to being organised the way they
> were, I'd be extremely grateful.
>
> Fervently hoping someone can help.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Kevin

I have not suffered this "help" from Vista, but my suggestion would be
the following:

1) Make sure all of the mp3s are backed up somewhere. Either still on
the old computer, or, if you have room on the HD, a new folder where you
have copied them. This is insurance should something go wrong and don't
want to rip your CDs again (which Vista will obliging sort for you
again). They will still be sorted into separate folders, but safe. The
rest of this is just finding the MP3s, copying them, and pasting them to
a new folder without being separated to album folders; it *should* be
safe, but safe is a relative term.

2) Create a new directory 'c:/users/username/MP3'

3) Open a search window Start Button>Search>For Files or Folders...

4) I'm Assuming Vista put them all in folders in the
'c:users/username/music' directory, so navigate to that folder in the
search window. If you search your entire HD you may find mp3s

5) Type "*.mp3" (w/o quotes) in the search; all of the mp3 files in the
should be listed in the results.

6) Select them all using Ctrl+A.

7) Right Click and select 'Copy'.

8) Navigate to the new MP3 directory made in step 2.

9) Right click and select Paste.

10) Wait & wait & wait while they are copied. If you backed them up
in step 1 you know how long it takes.
My 456 files took a few minutes, but most are sound effects and snippets
to use as ring tones, ~1.2 GB.

11) From now on Vista may still be 'helpful', but dragging & dropping
one or two separate album folders after they are ripped is not as hard
as unsorting an entire existing collection.

12) Whether you delete your original sorted files, or any backup you
made, is up to you and how much HD space you need to free up.

Note, if any files are not .mp3, such as ogg, wmp, aac, etc. you will
need to repeat for the various suffixes to copy them.

--

I'm glad my Mom named me Aaron,
That's what everybody calls me.

"Kevin Heneghan" <> wrote in message
news:...
> Hi - I wonder if anyone can help me.
>
> Last year I bought a new PC with Vista. I had a music folder with about
> 3,000 MP3's in it, the tracks just being listed alphabetically, by artist.
> When I copied this folder to my new PC, Vista organised all the tracks
> into
> folders according to the artist. This means that instead of having a
> folder
> full of tracks, all separate, they're now in a huge number of folders,
> which I have to open to try and find the track I want. It was MUCH easier
> just to have a plain long list of tracks organised by artist, and NOT in
> separate folders.
>
> If anyone could help me get my tracks back to being organised the way they
> were, I'd be extremely grateful.
>
> Fervently hoping someone can help.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Kevin
>
Perhaps one of your programs like Itunes might have done it but not Vista.