Consolidated multiple users' iTunes libraries

Roadrun3r said:

I believe the best option would be to make a playlist for each account and simply choose "Sync selected playlists."

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That should work fine.

Roadrun3r said:

I would like some advice on how to turn each library into a playlist and transfer all the songs into a central location.

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You could put a unique name in the comment field or some other unused field for all songs in a library, to denote whose library it is. Then when the libraries are merged, you could search for that name and add all the search results to the playlist for that person.

That doesn't address the fact that when you merge the libraries, you're likely to have duplicates that need to be resolved. In short, it can be a time consuming and tedious process. To help with that process, you may want to check out Dupin from Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes, which is a great resource for managing your iTunes tags and files.

However, there are reasons why you may want to keep some duplicates. iTunes considers items duplicates if the song name and artist fields match. They may be from different albums, have different lengths or bitrates, be different file types, be live or studio versions, etc. There is no software that can make all those determinations for you. The safest method of dupe deletion is manual. With any other method, you run the risk of deleting something you didn't intend to delete.

Here are a few scripts that I've found particularly useful:

By the way, there's no need to change the size of the font in your posts. The default size works quite well.