New mac mini and Itunes

[foofighters]

Im switching from an old PC to new mac mini. My itunes library is a mess. Things like nothing is uniformly labled, album songs are misnumbered, duplicates, one song in album the rest in another etc. When streaming to iPad to bluetooth speaker sometimes the data is wrong and or unrepsonsive.
Should i start from scratch will the mini mac and itunes? Whats the best way to organize music for itunes to work smoothly with iPad? I have an extra external drive so I can move the newly organized music library into "new" itunes on the mini? Any thoughts appreciated thanks.

 

[kumquat]

I'd advise against storing anything but apps on your machine and, instead, storing all of your media files (and everything else) on an external hard drive with another external set up to do daily backups. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for this. You really don't need all this stuff taking up space on your machine and slowing it down and, as your quantity of data increases, it's a lot easier to just swap in a new pair of larger externals than to either have to span your library across two drives or at that point copy it all to an external as you could have done to begin with. In Advanced just change the iTunes folder from the one on your computer to whatever the new folder on your external is.

Definitely change the iTunes setting which allows it to organize your library for you and keep it organized. There's an app called TuneUp which supposedly does exactly what it sounds like you need, but I haven't used it so can't vouch for it. Not sure how much luck you'll have with misnamed files; you'll probably have to go through and do those manually with SoundHound or the like if you can't figure out what they even are.

 

[aarond12]

I use TuneUp and, although sometimes it gives bad results, overall it is a good application. It will take some time to clean up a poorly-managed library, but it's worth it.