Help! iTunes consolidation

[james1758]

So I've tasked myself with reorganising my mac and in the process freeing up some space.

I've got to the the point where I'm trying to organise my Music folder in finder. Within that I'm trying to organise my iTunes folder (hopefully meaning I can get rid of limewire and frostwire folders in the process! The iPod folder is empty)


However having had my mac and iTunes library for over 5 years its a complete mess and me trying to consolidate everything hasn't worked. And it seems even more cluttered with files everywhere.


All I would like is it to look neat, so I know where everything is, and also have no duplicate files in other places.

I've tried all the consolidating malarky but I'm at a loss, and even then was unsure whether 'consolidating' would move the files or just copy them - copying them = more space used and more messy which is not what I want!

My iTunes folder certainly doesn't look like apple say it should after consolidating:


If anybody could help me to get all my iTunes files in one place it would be a great help!

Cheers,
James.

 

[jdblas69]

Consolidation does make a copy of all the items that are presently in your itunes library, so yes you are using up more space. However by consolidating your are in essence putting all of your itunes media in one location opposed to itunes reading files from several different file locations. Once you have consolidated then you can remove all the media files that are scattered from different files sources as you now have a copy in the itunes folder. If you want to play it safe what I would do is consolidate and then make a backup of the itunes folder and then go through and delete the duplicate items or those media that were in different file locations.

 

[Partron22]

You see where it says "in iTunes 9 and later, the iTunes folder is organized as follows"?
Apple's update to iTunes 9 wasn't clean. If you already had an iTunes 8 library in place, some of the old structure got left behind.
That can cause problems.
The solution I used, was to pull all my music etc out of iTunes, trash the contents of the weird-hybrid iTunes folder, and start over with an install of iTunes 9.
Doing that was a chore, but it fixed the folder structure, and caused album artwork to start sticking with albums again.
With the "Keep iTunes Media folder organized"*and "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" checkboxes checked, you can toss any music files left behind outside the music folder after you're done re-importing.

 

[james1758]

You see where it says "in iTunes 9 and later, the iTunes folder is organized as follows"?
Apple's update to iTunes 9 wasn't clean. If you already had an iTunes 8 library in place, some of the old structure got left behind.
That can cause problems.
The solution I used, was to pull all my music etc out of iTunes, trash the contents of the weird-hybrid iTunes folder, and start over with an install of iTunes 9.
Doing that was a chore, but it fixed the folder structure, and caused album artwork to start sticking with albums again.
With the "Keep iTunes Media folder organized"*and "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" checkboxes checked, you can toss any music files left behind outside the music folder after you're done re-importing.

Thanks I pretty much did this and it all seems to be fine and dandy