Consolidation Of iTunes, External HD Music, and Older Libraries..Help Please!

[bigcheez]

I am new here, but have appreciated all your help for quite some time!
I am relatively OK with iTunes, but cannot seem to figure out how to merge ALL my music, before I put into iTunes Match.
I have my main iTunes library, I have a similar one on my macbook I just migrated from, and, I have a lot of music folders, and at least one library on an external HD.
Every time I try to merge libraries, I get tons of duplicate songs, and run out of space on the machine!
Can anyone help me with setting up one location for all music, minus the dupes, and then I can migrate to my Air, and eventually, Match??
Thanks in advance, I hope my questions are not too dumb!!

Mike

 

[GGJstudios]

In iTunes > Preferences > Advanced uncheck these boxes:

Then you can add music from external drives without iTunes making copies of those songs on your internal drive. Just make sure your external drive is attached when you launch iTunes, so it can find those songs.

As far as duplicates, 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.

 

[bigcheez]

Thanks GGJ!

That's great, I'll get busy now! I do have many dupes that complete albums…and as you say, different versions of favorite songs. I don't mind a bit of cleaning up, but when I'm looking at 6000+ dupes, anything will help!

Thanks again!

MM

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GGJ,
Sorry, but what would be the suggestion on transferring tracks over from HD? dragging into iTunes, or consolidating into one folder, and dropping it into media??...

 

[GGJstudios]

Sorry, but what would be the suggestion on transferring tracks over from HD? dragging into iTunes, or consolidating into one folder, and dropping it into media??...

If you mean importing songs from an external drive: File > Add Folder to Library

 

[bigcheez]

Thanks!