Random surfing today led me to this post by Mr. Merlin Mann on using smart playlists in iTunes to do more than just organize music, but as a utility to find stuff that you don’t listen to.
Using one of the tips, I was able to clear out over 6GB of old podcasts that were left behind for whatever reason.
That empowered me to keep going with the pruning, especially after a search for duplicates showed me that I had over 1400 tracks that were doubled or, in some cases, tripled!
So, into finder I delved, searching for duplicates, moving them to a folder on the desktop and deleting them from my music folder. Also deleted a bunch of empty folders and tracks that I know I will never, ever listen to again.
As soon as I finished that, the stray mp3′s were archived onto my backup drive in a single zip file (just in case) and I emptied the trash. All together I think I was able to clear out close to, if not more than, 10gb 15gb of crap!
It’s not that I needed the space because all of my music lives on an external drive with 200GB of available space. It was the fact that my music library was a mess, and I was tired of it. I’ve been moving that folder from PC to PC to the Mac for the last 10 years. Trust me when I tell you it was a mess.
But not any longer. As I type this, my iTunes library is currently rebuilding itself and I expect it be done by the time I wake up in the morning. Once complete, I will do another check for duplicates and get rid of any that don’t belong and rebuild once more. A lot of work? Sure it is. Do I have the time? Sure I do. That’s why I decided to do it.
Sure there are programs out there, but have you tried any of them? Honestly, they pretty much suck and with the amount of dis-organization I was experiencing, it was just as easy for me to do it by hand this time.
I feel much better now. Thank you.
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