Tidying up my iTunes library

[alastair.humph]

When I open iTunes my library has 3837 songs and 16.32GB.
But when I look at the Music folder on my external hard drive where it is all kept it says it is 73GB!

Through various early, amateur attempts at moving the libraries around etc I have ended up with a chaotic system where folders called 'iTunes Library' [or similar] are nested within other folders seemingly ALSO containing all my music... (see attachment)

Unfortunately these folders are not all identical, though there is much overlap.

So my question is: how can I tidy this up? Basically I want to pick up one copy of every song on my computer and put it into a new, tidy library so that i delete the tangled chaos of the rest...?

Thank you!

 

[herodian]

bump for same issue

 

[jmann]

I suggest trying doing File>Library>Consolidate Library it should copy all of your music files in your iTunes into one Music folder. After making sure everything you want is there in that one folder. I would move anything over that is missing from the other files. And then delete all of the other extra files with songs. Maybe a problem was that when/if you deleted music out of your library you accidently only deleted it out of the library and not off your computer completely. And it made the situation even worse when you moved stuff around. Hope I helped.

 

[Moriarty]

Do what the above guy says. Go into iTunes preferences and make sure you know exactly which folder iTunes is going to copy to.

But when you delete everything else, leave it in your trash at least until you are sure that everything plays OK and is still intact.

 

[jmann]

Do what the above guy says. Go into iTunes preferences and make sure you know exactly which folder iTunes is going to copy to.

But when you delete everything else, leave it in your trash at least until you are sure that everything plays OK and is still intact.

You can quickly check to see if those exclamation marks appear next to the songs by clicking one song and pressing cmd+a and then dragging the tracks over to the sidebar until you see the number show up like you were going to drop them somewhere, and then drag them back to where they were. By doing this all of the song with messed up links will be flagged.