iTunes bankruptcy, step one: The Great Purge

I would have used iDupe. Works really well with sorting and trashing duplicates. When you use it you should uncheck a checkbox in preferences about donation or buying the program and it will let you use it as much as you want. I donated cause it was worth it to me to sort out all my itunes mess. I had 4 itunes libraries. iDupe is for Mac only. Srry pc users.

why is it called itunes bankruptcy? itunes isnt bankrupt. you are just didnt organize your music well. i dont get it.

I have maintained large library for a long time somewhere around 160Gb. For a while it was on a single family use iMac with multiple accounts. My solution then was to put the whole library in the public folder, so that ALL accounts had access. The problem there was if one person didn't like a song they could delete it regardless of who else liked it or purchased it. So then I went in from root and created a public root folder with read-only permissions. So the root was the only person who could preeminently delete tunes, but others could just remove them from their library if they didn't like them. Now when there is new music in this setup, that everyone wants to hear; you do have to run add to library, but as long as it's always the same folder it shouldn't duplicate, it will just add the new songs that aren't in the library. That worked for a long time.

Later, after getting out of HS and having my own computers I made a mistake while backing up the library, and ended up with some 100Gb of duplication. I didn't want to go manually through. So I then found a Windows application that was very good at duplicate finding and selection for erasure. Using some complex algorithms it can identify any time if exact duplicate. So all my songs that were say, on more than one album, didn't get marked, only true duplicates did. Some album duplicates I expect to have because i have allot of work from a single artist who might put a top track on several albums, and I like have my albums remain intact. So this solution worked great, I simply scanned through the thousands of tracks to make sure they were just the duplicates i wanted gone. They were, the auto finder found them and marked them appropriately. So their, Bob's your uncle, 100Gb of duplicates gone. I go back in, rebuild the library sans-duplicates.

Overall just knowing how to use it, and solve the problems creatively makes iTunes a man for all seasons.

I'm suprised no-one has yet talked about complete independance from iTunes/Songbird/Winamp etc. I can't be the only looney who over manages their collection?

Drag everything you own into Mp3Tag (www.mp3tag.de/en/) and clean up those files!

Remove everything bar Album/Artist/Track/TrackNo./Year/RegainLvL.
Add album art at a set size, I use 500x500 (which is useful for the iPad owners!).
Play around with the IDTag to Filename conversion, it rocks!
I use /Artist/Album/00 - Track.format.

Once you have a tidy music collect it really doesn't matter what software you use to play it. Just don't let any of them automatically manage your collection and you'll find no issues with album art being auto downloaded in smaller sizes or tags changing etc.

Pristine collection for over 3 years now, auto manage be damned!

My procedure for filtering iTunes content is to use ratings.
I have several playlists that I use for this, that get synced to all my iDevices; "Unrated" and "Least Recently Played ✭✭½+".

When I feel like reviewing songs I play my Unrated playlist and give everything ratings; ✭✭✭✭✭ for great stuff I love and ✭✭ for stuff I don't like very much but want to keep in my library. I of course use all the other combinations of ✭'s and ½'s to rating music appropriate to my tastes.

When playing Least Recently Played, if I hear a song I don't like as much as I used to, I will mark it down.

This is a filtering technique I've used since my first iPod, stays dynamic and is still 100% compatible with Genius, Ping and most other reviewing techniques.

WRT to duplicates, I use iTunes "Display Duplicates" feature; I used to use The "Show Duplicates" Applescript but Apple's implementation is much nicer than Doug's Script.

I've managed to keep my library neat, even with a new installation of Windows and a migration to Mac. I have the same iTunes library file now as I did in 2004 when I started using it. (Of course, it doesn't say that, since every iTunes upgrade changes the "Created on" date.)

I had a similar issue, but I just used PowerTunes to manage my libraries - I created a 'clean' library and just transferred stuff I wanted, making sure that each import was metadata and artwork complete.

I also use Dupin to manage duplicates.

What is this "purging" and "throwing away files" that people are talking about? Storage is cheap. Through a combination of AutoRate (and previously iRate) and Smart Playlists, I can keep 30,000 songs on my computer, but a nice variety on my iPod for when I'm on the go, without sweating not having "exactly the song I need right now" or getting stuck listening to too many one-star wonders in a row.

In order to organize my iTunes library I used 2 programs to assist me, Tune-up and identify2. Tune up helped with the music and identify2 with tagging&metadata for movies&tv shows. I took 1 week off work and spent 8 hours a day, 7 days in a row. This may sound extreme but my media collection was worth it to be able to watch/listen to music with all metadata in place. My media collection resides on an external harddrive and is backed up in 3 locations on a monthly basis. In tune-up it will scan your music and let you know which music is missing cover art and how many songs in your library have " messed up data". (missing the year,artist,album name,genre,year,track number). After going thru the music I deleted any song that was not part of a complete album. I took my music collection from 40,000 songs to 20,000 and 1000 complete albums.
Now before I add any media to my collection I pre-screen it on an external harddrive on a computer sepeate from my home theater pc. Like others I have folders for each media type(tv shows,movies,music,books) that is where I add the new media according to type. Using the 2 aforementioned programs to scan&add the information/metadata prior to addition to my media collection is the best way to organize and keep everything looking perfect in cover flow
-Andy

I use alias' to organize my media types on external drives.