Pain-free iTunes

Well, relatively pain free anyway. What a horrible horrible piece of software it is too - massive, slow, unintuitive. It make me feel tense using it. I use Linux as my OS but find that I have to use iTunes to manage music for my iPhone.

A little background - I have a lot of mp3s, all from CD ripped to the Uberstandard. Basically, this standard ensures the best possible mp3 reproduction of the CD, with all mp3 files tagged correctly. When I first started ripping CDs this way, I was told to avoid letting iTunes manage mp3s as it could change the tags, meaning the mp3 no longer met the standard. I'm not certain that this is still true, but I don't want to simply point iTunes at my music folder and let it do its stuff. I'm sure for people who are happy for their mp3s to be altered, iTunes does a fine job. For me, however, using iTunes means copying tracks to a new location before iTunes gets its paws on them.

I tried dragging and dropping from the new location onto the iTunes UI, but iTunes created duplicates of every track. Useless...

Anyway, because I use iTunes so infrequently (occasionally stick a load of tracks on the phone, get annoyed, and get the hell out of there) I've never really worked out the steps to follow each time that will work for me. I have now, and here they are:

1. find the iTunes media folder. For me this is C:\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Media
2. in there there is a folder called "Automatically Add to iTunes"
3. choose the music you want to put on the phone/iPod and copy it to a new location
4. from this new location, drag and drop the music files to the "Automatically Add to iTunes" folder
5. if iTunes is running, it will automatically move the mp3s to the library. For me, it leave empty directories behind, but I can handle that
6. now, back in iTunes, select the device you want the music added to. Select Music at the top of the screen, select Sync Music and select the "Selected playlists, artists and genres" option. This means on the artists/albums etc you choose lower down on the screen will be added to the device. Anything that is already on the phone but is not checked on this screen will be removed from the device. I think it's this bit that takes some getting used to
7. click Apply