For years, one of the biggest complaints about iTunes has been its inability to automatically add new music to your library from a watched folder. As of yesterday's iTunes 9 release, that's no longer the case.
iTunes now automatically adds new music to your library from a watched folder they quietly added to the iTunes Music folder structure. Apple did its darndest to sneak this new feature in under the radar among several who-cares features, but for our money, it's absolutely the best feature to come to iTunes 9. So how does it work?
Just find the folder named Automatically Add to iTunes in your iTunes Music folder (~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Automatically Add to iTunes/ in OS X; C:\Users\Your Username\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Automatically Add to iTunes\ in Windows). Any music that finds its way into that folder will automatically be imported into iTunes.
Let's say, for example, you downloaded Radiohead's In Rainbows via BitTorrent. Previously you'd have to manually add the music to iTunes via drag and drop—not a big deal, but kind of annoying, considering every other music player on the planet can watch folders for new music. We've shown you how to automatically sync iTunes to any folder in the past (and shown you a few other tools offering similar functionality).
Now you can use iTunes' new watch folder to take care of this for you. (For what it's worth, most BitTorrent clients have a feature that allows you to move completed downloads to specific folders—that's probably the folder you'll now want your music downloads to move to.)
I gave it a try on my Mac and the MP3 I added vanished nearly instantaneously. A quick search of my iTunes library later and there it was. (It's still in my file system, of course—it's just organized in iTunes' Artist/Album structure.)
It's not a groundbreaking feature, but considering it's been one of lamest feature omissions of iTunes for years, we're excited to have it.
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