iTunes Consolidation mess

[masterp34588]

My iTunes library is currently a pig stye. It appears that I have three different directories that iTunes was reading from and I believe that was causing iTunes to run slow. I purchased an external HD to house my library temporarily and used iTunes to consolidate my library there a few days ago. I also have all the old iTunes folders still on my iMac HD.

I guess I have a two fold question. First of all it doesn't matter that the hard drive that I just consolidated my library to is formatted as Fat32 if I plan on returning it to my iMac HD?

This is where I get confused and brings me to my next question. iTunes says my library is 276.84GB.

The external HD where I have my iTunes library says that I'm using 289.12GB. What's with the discrepancy in size? When I check the sizes of the folders where my iTunes library used to reside I get the following numbers:
/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music - 181.75GB
/Music/windows - 168.78GB
/Music/Library - 37.33GB

If I add those up I get 387.86GB. What does that mean if it's off by 111.02? The only reason I'm worried about this is because I've spent years tagging and adding album artwork to my library and I would hate to see some of that go to waste.

 

[justaregularjoe]

My iTunes library is currently a pig stye. It appears that I have three different directories that iTunes was reading from and I believe that was causing iTunes to run slow. I purchased an external HD to house my library temporarily and used iTunes to consolidate my library there a few days ago. I also have all the old iTunes folders still on my iMac HD.

I guess I have a two fold question. First of all it doesn't matter that the hard drive that I just consolidated my library to is formatted as Fat32 if I plan on returning it to my iMac HD?

This is where I get confused and brings me to my next question. iTunes says my library is 276.84GB.

The external HD where I have my iTunes library says that I'm using 289.12GB. What's with the discrepancy in size? When I check the sizes of the folders where my iTunes library used to reside I get the following numbers:
/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music - 181.75GB
/Music/windows - 168.78GB
/Music/Library - 37.33GB

If I add those up I get 387.86GB. What does that mean if it's off by 111.02? The only reason I'm worried about this is because I've spent years tagging and adding album artwork to my library and I would hate to see some of that go to waste.

1) FAT 32 is fine, but I prefer HFS+. For many reasons.
2) You more than likely have massive numbers of duplicates in you library, causing trhe size reading discrepeancies.
3)Heres what I suggest. Leave eveything the way it is, and create a new user on you mac (THIS ONE WILL BE THE EASIEST), or use a different computer with iTunes entirely. Hook up the external HD, open up iTunes, and import all of the music on the drive. Look for changes. There will likely be some, but DO NOT bother correcting them now. Just see what is going on. If it is mostly all well, then go ahead and return it (TO ONE SINGLE FOLDER THIS TIME! ) to your iMac

 

[ntrigue]

Under iTunes Preferences you would go to Advanced. Then modify the destination to the file path where you want ALL songs to be copied.

Choose Consolidate Library at which time every file that appears in iTunes will be copied to the new file path. Once you're certain everything came across you can delete the other three folders.

 

[masterp34588]

I just forgot to change the HD from the default FAT32 to HFS+. I'm just planning on moving everything from the external HD back onto my iMac as soon as I get this figured out.

I figured that it was being caused by duplicates but even now after I consolidated my library to the external HD the total library size (as stated IN iTunes) is the same as it was prior to consolidating to the external HD. iTunes also states that I have the same number of songs in my library. Just to be clear I've already consolidated my library from my iMac to the external HD. I now have the old remaining library on my iMac and the current one that iTunes is reading on my external HD. I got curious and decided to check the folder sizes to make sure everything adds up. I assume that some of the songs in my iTunes music folders aren't actually IN iTunes hopefully this is just duplicates but I sure as hell don't want to go through 60,000 songs and figure it out. I want to bring my library back to my iMac HD in /Music/iTunes/iTunes Music ASAP so I can upgrade to Snow Leopard.

 

[ntrigue]

I would suggest Dupin for discovering duplicates.