Hi there.
If anyone can offer advice I would be greatly appreciative!
I have a fairly large music collection consisting of ripped CDs (wma and mp3), downloaded albums and singles (from itunes and other sites), my own recorded music, podcasts...you name it.
I've used itunes on a number of PCs and now have it on my new imac. I want to gather everything together in one place.
I've also gone through the process of backing up my collection in a rather haphazard manner, which has meant that when I gathered all my mp3s from various places, there were many cloned folders and files all over the place. I seem to have about 4 or 5 different folders called "itunes". Also, due to the fact that itunes consolidates your collection by copying some files, there are even more duplicates kicking around.
The result is, that I now have an mp3 library of around 260gb of files, and probably about 200gb of that is made up of duplicate files.
I'd like to have all my music in one place, organised in a standard folder structure of artist>album>songs. I want everything to be in mp3 format, rather than proprietary formats like aac (where possible).
At the moment, if I were to import this bloated folder into itunes, every album I select would have about 4 or 5 copies of each song listed in it.
So what do you recommend?
One thing that I was thinking was...would it be feasible to simply remove all the mp3 files from their folders and move them to a single folder? As long as the tags were intact, would there be some way to restore them to the desired folder structure?
If I'm copying albums onto an mp3 CD for my car, or to my mp3 player, I want to navigate to the folder using Finder and drag and drop. It's no good if I have to do everything through itunes, so unless there's some way to restore the folder structure, that method I mentioned above probably wouldn't work.
Stuff I've looked at includes:
Clone Tools (pc)
Easy Duplicate Finder (pc)
Tidy Songs (mac/pc)
The latter seems interesting, but I'm not entirely convinced it will do what I want it to...
If anyone has been in this situation, I'd love to hear how you fixed it!
If anyone can offer advice I would be greatly appreciative!
I have a fairly large music collection consisting of ripped CDs (wma and mp3), downloaded albums and singles (from itunes and other sites), my own recorded music, podcasts...you name it.
I've used itunes on a number of PCs and now have it on my new imac. I want to gather everything together in one place.
I've also gone through the process of backing up my collection in a rather haphazard manner, which has meant that when I gathered all my mp3s from various places, there were many cloned folders and files all over the place. I seem to have about 4 or 5 different folders called "itunes". Also, due to the fact that itunes consolidates your collection by copying some files, there are even more duplicates kicking around.
The result is, that I now have an mp3 library of around 260gb of files, and probably about 200gb of that is made up of duplicate files.
I'd like to have all my music in one place, organised in a standard folder structure of artist>album>songs. I want everything to be in mp3 format, rather than proprietary formats like aac (where possible).
At the moment, if I were to import this bloated folder into itunes, every album I select would have about 4 or 5 copies of each song listed in it.
So what do you recommend?
One thing that I was thinking was...would it be feasible to simply remove all the mp3 files from their folders and move them to a single folder? As long as the tags were intact, would there be some way to restore them to the desired folder structure?
If I'm copying albums onto an mp3 CD for my car, or to my mp3 player, I want to navigate to the folder using Finder and drag and drop. It's no good if I have to do everything through itunes, so unless there's some way to restore the folder structure, that method I mentioned above probably wouldn't work.
Stuff I've looked at includes:
Clone Tools (pc)
Easy Duplicate Finder (pc)
Tidy Songs (mac/pc)
The latter seems interesting, but I'm not entirely convinced it will do what I want it to...
If anyone has been in this situation, I'd love to hear how you fixed it!
