iTunes Match - Delete matched songs to free up space

reebzor said:

Ok, so I have my "master" iTunes library on my Mac Mini, and it is over 100GB (over 22,000 songs). I have iTunes Match, but a couple hundred files are not "matched" due to being duplicate or lower quality, etc.

I want to get an SSD, which will require me to free up some space. I want to figure out how I can delete *only* the songs that are matched from my iTunes library to free up the space. Obviously, I don't want to actually delete any music, I just only want the files that are not in iTunes match to be on my HDD.

Anyone know how to do this?

Thanks

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not really "qualified" to answer that question since iMatch (lol) hasn't been released in sweden, but: why not use the drive as a external disk (buy a USB/Firewire cabinet) and use the SSD internally for the system?

reebzor said:

I want to figure out how I can delete *only* the songs that are matched from my iTunes library to free up the space.

Click to expand...

Sort your songs according to the iCloud status, than mark all matched songs and hit the delete button (with "Also delete this song from iCloud" not being flagged)?

reebzor said:

Oh yes, I definitely could do that. In fact, it's all backed up on a NAS right now anyway. I just wanted to clean it up a bit, plus the versions in iTunes Match are better quality than the ones that I personally ripped so I'd prefer to have the iTunes ones.


Yea this sounds like exactly what I am looking for. I did not know you had the option to delete from the computer without deleting it from iTunes Match.

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if you already have a backup, then delete through itunes as Mike said and let us know if it worked
good to know

Can no longer "delete' from iTunes.

Only "Hide" now.

Menel said:

Can no longer "delete' from iTunes.

Only "Hide" now.

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I noticed this too and wondered how does this affect the songs you own and upload because they aren't on iTunes? If it just hides these rather than delete then you will eventually hit your maximum allowed uploads? So i'm assuming if you upload it you can delete it still?

reebzor said:

Ok, so I have my "master" iTunes library on my Mac Mini, and it is over 100GB (over 22,000 songs). I have iTunes Match, but a couple hundred files are not "matched" due to being duplicate or lower quality, etc.

I want to get an SSD, which will require me to free up some space. I want to figure out how I can delete *only* the songs that are matched from my iTunes library to free up the space. Obviously, I don't want to actually delete any music, I just only want the files that are not in iTunes match to be on my HDD.

Click to expand...

Instead of doing this, you could look at threads here about adding an SSD drive to a Mac and building your own Fusion Drive. That way you have size and speed at the same time. Could be cheaper, if you wanted to get 256GB and use Fusion with 128GB instead.

Futhark said:

I noticed this too and wondered how does this affect the songs you own and upload because they aren't on iTunes? If it just hides these rather than delete then you will eventually hit your maximum allowed uploads? So i'm assuming if you upload it you can delete it still?

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No I discovered when trying to fix an 'uploaded' track. Hide instead of delete.

reebzor said:

Yea this sounds like exactly what I am looking for. I did not know you had the option to delete from the computer without deleting it from iTunes Match.

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That's basically the major advantage of iTunes Match - having your songs available even with limited storage capacity (of course mostly affected are iPhones or iPads, but the same counts for Macs).

Menel said:

Can no longer "delete' from iTunes.

Only "Hide" now.

Click to expand...

Futhark said:

I noticed this too and wondered how does this affect the songs you own and upload because they aren't on iTunes? If it just hides these rather than delete then you will eventually hit your maximum allowed uploads? So i'm assuming if you upload it you can delete it still?

Click to expand...

Guess there was some kind of a legal background to change the wording. I remember several times when deleting a track and again adding it some time later it immediately appeared as uploaded again.

So there seems to exist some kind of buffering, which is quite normal for any database as it's not being reorganized every day. And that had to be considered in the wording...but that's just a guess.