I have been moving our music library to a new external disc drive this weekend, and after running the consolidate command from iTunes (File > Library > Consolidate Library) I noticed that although I only have each track listed once in iTunes, I have two files for each track in the iTunes music directory (MyMusic). There seems to be some thought on the web that the current version of iTunes might have bug that can cause this.
After a bit of research in the web, it seems there is no particularly easy way to remove the duplicates, which have identical properties apart from the ” 1″ added at the end of the name:
As we have about 13 000 tracks, and they are stored in around 1000 different folders, this was not something I wanted to fix by hand. And it needed fixing, as the duplicates are using about 80 GB on the hard disk. There don’t seem to be any programs available to tidy the mess up, but if you have some additional disk space, one way is as follows:
- Create a new empty folder (or directory) on a disc which has enough space to take the iTunes music
- Move your music to the new location – see this Apple Support article for the details. It is very easy.
- Now tell iTunes to consolidate your library (File > Library > Consolidate Library). This will move the tracks actually used by iTunes to the new location, ignoring the duplicates.
- Once that has finished, delete the original iTunes music folder where the duplicates are
- Now create a new folder in the original location and repeat the above steps in to move the music back to the correct location and delete the temporary folder that you created
This worked fine for me on a Mac, and I imagine it will work just as well on a Windows PC too.
If you check that everything arrived in the top level folders (check the size and number of files) before you delete the old ones, I don’t think much can go wrong.
I really wish I read this BEFORE I went and deleted all the 1.mp3 files (which I did by searching 1.mp3 and deleting all these files which was difficult since some of my the original song files ended with 1.mp3 but thats another story).
Basically i’ve deleted all the 1.mp3 files and now have a whole heap of exclamation points on iTunes because the program is trying to find the 1.mp3 files rather than the originals.
HELP?
I think you might be stuck with having to delete all the files in iTunes that now have an exclamation mark. (It is a quick process, as iTunes knows there is no file found and goes right ahead and does it without asking if you also want to delete the physical file on the disk).
You can then import all the non-1.mp3 files that you now have into iTunes from their current location (for example – select all the tracks, right mouse click, and “open with iTunes”), which get you back to where you want to be. I think you will lose your star-ratings for the tracks. If you have embedded the artwork in the music, which I always do, you won’t have to download the artwork again. There’s a script to embed the artwork here.
I hope that helps!
Hey,
Thanks a lot… This helped me
I suppose this problem doesn’t occur after I upgraded my iTunes to latest version 9.0.3(15). Coz when I rename or change anything in my song info, the folders get arranged accordingly without leaving any extra copies.
I had many duplicate files due to the older version of iTunes. Your post helped me remove those…
Thanks again.
Cheers,
Tej
damn. i have plenty of identical files atm because i have a new laptop and my old comp is so fucked up that i for some stuff it was easier to just copy it from my ipod, with filenames like FJEI OEIG HRIE IRGI…. so i thought this could help me fix both the filenames and duplicates… and well now i have these song & song1 files… :/