After moving my music folders around some on the remote computer I use for music storage etc., itunes on my main computer went nuts, and created a lot of duplicate song entries. I got frustrated enough with it yesterday, I deleted the whole app and reinstalled it. Well, after over 20 HOURS of grinding to load the library and pull down album artwork, it's done the same damned thing again- duplicates for maybe 70% of the song entries- one of the entries has a valid path to the song, one gives error message saying it can't find the song.

I can't find a command that will let me globally delete the non-functional dupes, and I will have to be committed to the asylum if I have to do them one at a time. Anyone know a way to do this?

i have the same problem

I think if you disable the "keep my music folder organized" setting while moving stuff, it keeps things like this from happening.

I don't know, though. I've never had this problem.

Isn't there a library file you can delete so it recreates a new listing?

Back when I had iTunes, I would remove everything from the library and add folders back in.

yes, this is a setting you can disable. I'm not sure why the setting exists.

its the idiot-proofing in itunes that makes it so completely difficult for people who have any sense about them.

ive honestly grown to love it now that i tell it what to do and it does it pretty well.

foobar

i just dont know how some of you continue to have problems with itunes. ive never once had an issue. granted, some of you are probably trying to do a shitload more with it than i do, but all i'm doing is loading in music, and playing it.

i guess i've never needed to have any more categorization than artist and album

Reorganizing, renaming, retagging...all play havoc.

I'm about to adopt the Sketchy way of organizing with 26 sub folders, one for each letter of the alphabet. Right now, I have them by artist in a big artist folder. This results in a lot of scrolling.

im with robotboy.

i don't know how people continually fuck up itunes.

drag your files onto it.
it sets up the folders for you... don't worry about it because you can still sort it any way you want.

Or Media Monkey

What I don't get is why Itunes can't simply synch your Music folder? Seems like an obvious thing. There are a bunch of 'dead' links in Itunes to songs that I have moved, how hard is it for Itunes to recognize and delete those links??

it takes the whole "manage your music library" thing seriously and wont try it if you dont want it to have total control

dear grandpa,
itunes has it's own folder.
it's better than yours.
drag your folders into itunes and let itunes copy it (the right way) for you.
then you can go ahead and throw yours away.

I've found that the Itunes folder gets pretty screwed up if you are doing a lot of retagging. When this happens, I fix the tags that I can, rename the Itunes directory, create a new one and drop the old one onto it. That seems to prune the garbage out of the directory tree, leaving me with less dead links and duplicates don't get imported because it ignores the duplicates on the re-import.

PITA? Yup, but it works well enough.

There is a shareware app out there called Dupe Eliminator or something like that that will identify them in Itunes and allow you to delete them. I'm not willing to pay the fee to unlock it so its usable though.

I also usually use mp3tag on the old Itunes directory to clean up/normalize tags and filenames before the re-import.

dear hamnegger,
stop drinking the sterno.
it's clearly making you
null and void.

at least i know how to operate a computer

umm...i was doing computers
when you were still shitting green, cochise.
use your shitty software
i'll use mine.

you were doing computers this morning?

Yup

while i don't have tons of issues with it, about 4 months ago i had to do a complete library wipe and reload which was a pain in the ass.

Here's how I avoid these problems:

(1) Open iTunes;
(2) create new playlist;
(3) copy and drag tracks from album file into new playlist;
(4) insert CD-R into burner;
(5) click on Burn Disc button;
(6) remove CD-R when burning is completed;
(7) insert CD-R into CD player and hit PLAY button;
(8) delete files from iTunes.

I prefer just playing the songs really loud from my computer speakers and recording them to cassette tape.

i wish the songbird app folks would hurry up and improve that player's memory management, ipod management and generally not delete all one's music from one's hard drive. with these improvements, i'd use songbird instead of itunes.

is there any possibility to transfer music to an ipod with another application than itunes?

(update: I found something called sharepod, any thoughts about it?)