switcher, a bit confused with iLife

[spacecataz42]

Hello everyone,
Typical case, used windows since i was old enough to sit at a computer screen,
recent hype around apple's caught my attention and looking into it i decided
to make the switch since it would better suit my lifestyle being in a touring band.

so here i big wad of cash later with this lovely macbook 2.16ghz.
i was migrating files from my pc to it and i hit my first bump when i moved my
pictures and music.

When i imported my songs to iTunes for example, a program i used on pc regardless, it looked like it was making copies of each song in the iTunes Music folder. I never noticed it doing this on pc and since ive got over 40gigs of music , if its making doubles of everything just to have it in itunes thats going to kill my hard drive.

I ran into the same problem when i put my photos into iPhoto.

can someone please tell me what's going on? is this a problem or are those 'duplicates' nothing to worry about?

any help would be great!

 

[mkrishnan]

Hi and welcome. Both of these applications have options in their preferences (e.g. iTunes menu -> preferences -> advanced -> copy files into itunes music folder... in iTunes) as to whether they put songs into a library or let you just keep them wherever you want. The default behavior is to put them in the library. The idea isn't that you end up with two copies of each song. The idea is that most users would get the computer, start ripping or buying songs, and just keep the one copy in the library. When I get songs that for whatever reason come to me as song files before they're in iTunes, I just drag them into iTunes, let it import and copy them, and then delete the originals.

You can easily turn this off by changing that option. There's a similar one in iPhoto.

As far as I know, iTunes on Windows works in exactly this same way, although I've really never used it. Perhaps you just changed the preference long ago in Windows and forgot about it?