Many years ago when I went through the process of putting my vast CD collection on to iTunes, I decided to save both an Apple Lossless copy (for potential steaming at home) as well as a 256 aac duplicate (to keep file size manageable and allow iPods/iPhones to hold plenty of tracks.
As it stands now, I don’t stream from my NAS (online music streaming has superseded the need for that). iTunes on my PC is rarely used.
A recent iPhone change meant I needed to get all my music back on my phone.
When I opened up iTunes I realised that most tracks appear 5 times: the original two (lossless and aac) as well as duplicates it has found at some point on backup hard drives (which I’ve used to back up my music files).
I’ve realised I need to sort this mess out. I’ve purchased Tunesweeper as a starting point, but need to plan carefully how to proceed and have a few questions:
Firstly, is there an easy/correct way to remove the tracks that have been found from other drives and leave the tracks from my ‘primary’ music drive? This would remove the unnecessary duplicates, leaving my with my original 2 copies: lossless and aac.
Secondly, when removing duplicates, is there any way to avoid removing intended duplicates (those on greatest hit or compilation albums) and just remove the genuine duplicates?
Any advice would be handy as I’m guessing this is a job I need to do once and correctly!
As it stands now, I don’t stream from my NAS (online music streaming has superseded the need for that). iTunes on my PC is rarely used.
A recent iPhone change meant I needed to get all my music back on my phone.
When I opened up iTunes I realised that most tracks appear 5 times: the original two (lossless and aac) as well as duplicates it has found at some point on backup hard drives (which I’ve used to back up my music files).
I’ve realised I need to sort this mess out. I’ve purchased Tunesweeper as a starting point, but need to plan carefully how to proceed and have a few questions:
Firstly, is there an easy/correct way to remove the tracks that have been found from other drives and leave the tracks from my ‘primary’ music drive? This would remove the unnecessary duplicates, leaving my with my original 2 copies: lossless and aac.
Secondly, when removing duplicates, is there any way to avoid removing intended duplicates (those on greatest hit or compilation albums) and just remove the genuine duplicates?
Any advice would be handy as I’m guessing this is a job I need to do once and correctly!
