Easily clean up an iTunes library

Jul 21, '03 09:11:00AM

Contributed by: muxlow

Every so often, the hardrive bearing the weight of my iTunes library reaches it's limit, causing me to spend a couple of hours archiving and deleting albums. Once the files are deleted from the drive, though, I'm faced with the unwelcome task of going through iTunes and deleting all tracks referencing files I've taken off the drive. Today, I stumbled onto an easy workaround:

  1. Delete songs from your hardrive as needed
  2. Open iTunes
  3. Select a particular genre's worth of songs
  4. Select all tracks within this genre
  5. Get Info for all selected tracks
  6. Rename the genre to anything other than what it currently is. In my case, the 'Metal' genre becomes 'Metal1'
  7. When iTunes finishes updating all the tracks with the new genre, you'll be left with two genres: 'Metal1', with all the updated tracks and 'Metal', which neatly contains all the tracks pointing to files you've just deleted, ripe for easy removal.
Piece of cake!

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