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Easily clean up an iTunes library
Authored by: fletcherpenney on Jul 21, '03 10:26:53AM

I'm going to ask a stupid question - why not just delete your files using iTunes? The files will be deleted as well, and all references will be handled appropriately. And of course, you can always burn the songs to a cd or copy them to another drive prior to deletion, perhaps using a temporary playlist to decide which files to destroy.

I don't understand the benefit of deleting from the finder, especially when you have to go through this convoluted scheme of fixing your iTunes library.

Also, I may be mistaken, but I believe that changing the genre on all of your songs will update their modification date. I use those dates to determine which files are backed up so that I can back up new songs without backing up 10 gigs of files. If every songs was modified, my backup that week would be enourmous. Perhaps others are, or should be ;) doing something similar.

But perhaps there are some advantages I don't understand that you could elaborate on?



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Easily clean up an iTunes library
Authored by: Spartacus on Jul 21, '03 10:38:25AM

iTunes behaves differently whether songs are located inside or outside of the iTunes Music folder (as set in the preferences). If you uncheck the option in "Preferences -> Advanced -> Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library", iTunes references them where they're located on your hard disk, which can be a second partition, another disk or a CD/DVD, instead of copying them to its library.

When you delete songs in iTunes, it asks whether you want to move the files to the trash, but only if they're located inside the iTunes Music folder. If they're on another disk, iTunes will leave them alone. Therefore this hint is interesting if you're cleaning e.g. a second disk full of MP3s.

Note: Explaining this gave me an idea for a hint. Be right back.



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