Random iTunes Folder Behavior

No, I'm not talking about shuffling by album, which is almost the greatest media player feature ever.

I'm talking about the persistence of folders. Here's the deal: As has been documented in excruciating detail elsewhere, I've been forced to reconstruct my MP3 library after a hard drive mishap. In restoring tracks from my iPod, some of those tracks ended up with slightly different filenames than they did previously. So, iTunes thinks they're missing, but they're really not, and prompts me to find the file when I try to retrieve its information.

Here's where it gets slightly weird. This process pretty emphatically does not remember the last directory you accessed when you did this. So, if you're in your root music directory, and track down one file, if the next file you track down is in the same directory, you still start in your root music directory and have to click your way to the proper location again.

Which gets to be a pain in the ass if you're relocating an entire album's worth of songs. There is, however, a trick. After locating one of the files, quit iTunes and restart the program. Now the "default" folder when looking for a missing file will be the last one you opened. It's not the most elegant workaround, but it does actually work.