I'm a dumbo who needs help!
Please excuse the idiocy.....
I have a laptop with a 40gb hard drive, and it keeps saying its full up. So I checked itunes and my ipod and I only have about 13gb of music on it. Now the laptop is new, so its not old work and there are only a few photos on it. I think what's happened is that when I put my cds onto the computer I ripped them using windows media player and there are loads of music folders in 'My Music' the I added them to itunes.
but i found a folder in there called 'itunes' which i didn't create and its about 8gb. When you go into it, it just seems completely random. I can't tell whether its duplicated all my music because it seems to have taken random tracks and artists for folder names, mainly off compilation cds (particularly off the dirty dancing soundtrack for some peculiar reason!).
Next problem, I am in Korea for one year so and 4000 miles away from my cds, so I?m reluctant to start deleting files because I don't wan those exclamation marks coming up next to my music in itunes. However it must have at least duplicated if not trebled my music collection and its wasting precious download space, and driving me crazy!
Sorry for the rambling, but as you can probably tell, I have no clue how to solve this. Just wondering whether your itunes did this too.
Also I am going to buy a external hard drive to solve the storage problem, but I still don't want duplicate copies in itunes and windows.
Any help would be gratefully appreciated!
Thanks
I have a laptop with a 40gb hard drive, and it keeps saying its full up. So I checked itunes and my ipod and I only have about 13gb of music on it. Now the laptop is new, so its not old work and there are only a few photos on it. I think what's happened is that when I put my cds onto the computer I ripped them using windows media player and there are loads of music folders in 'My Music' the I added them to itunes.
but i found a folder in there called 'itunes' which i didn't create and its about 8gb. When you go into it, it just seems completely random. I can't tell whether its duplicated all my music because it seems to have taken random tracks and artists for folder names, mainly off compilation cds (particularly off the dirty dancing soundtrack for some peculiar reason!).
Next problem, I am in Korea for one year so and 4000 miles away from my cds, so I?m reluctant to start deleting files because I don't wan those exclamation marks coming up next to my music in itunes. However it must have at least duplicated if not trebled my music collection and its wasting precious download space, and driving me crazy!
Sorry for the rambling, but as you can probably tell, I have no clue how to solve this. Just wondering whether your itunes did this too.
Also I am going to buy a external hard drive to solve the storage problem, but I still don't want duplicate copies in itunes and windows.
Any help would be gratefully appreciated!
Thanks
Comments
Please excuse the idiocy.....
I have a laptop with a 40gb hard drive, and it keeps saying its full up. So I checked itunes and my ipod and I only have about 13gb of music on it. Now the laptop is new, so its not old work and there are only a few photos on it. I think what's happened is that when I put my cds onto the computer I ripped them using windows media player and there are loads of music folders in 'My Music' the I added them to itunes.
but i found a folder in there called 'itunes' which i didn't create and its about 8gb. When you go into it, it just seems completely random. I can't tell whether its duplicated all my music because it seems to have taken random tracks and artists for folder names, mainly off compilation cds (particularly off the dirty dancing soundtrack for some peculiar reason!).
Next problem, I am in Korea for one year so and 4000 miles away from my cds, so I?m reluctant to start deleting files because I don't wan those exclamation marks coming up next to my music in itunes. However it must have at least duplicated if not trebled my music collection and its wasting precious download space, and driving me crazy!
Sorry for the rambling, but as you can probably tell, I have no clue how to solve this. Just wondering whether your itunes did this too.
Also I am going to buy a external hard drive to solve the storage problem, but I still don't want duplicate copies in itunes and windows.
Any help would be gratefully appreciated!
Thanks
Your music should be stored in the iTunes folder and its subfolders. To check this, highlight a song from any album in iTunes and select the option from the file menu that says "show in finder" or "show song file." It will come up and you will see where it's located.
If you have another copy somewhere else, that is the copy I would delete. This should be fairly easy to check for. If you imported your CDs with iTunes, I don't know why you'd have two copies.
second, to make sure that there are no duplicate files, choose "Consolidate library" from the "Advanced" menu in iTunes. this copies all of your music directly to the iTunes folder in you home folder (and organizes them). then you can go and delete the other folders that you know of. this way, all of your music is intact, stored and sorted in a single location, and you have no duplicates. the "consolidate library" function also tells iTunes to use the copies of the songs in the iTunes folder, so you don't have to worry about that obnoxious exclamation point next to the song name in iTunes.
BTW, in the "Importing" tab of the "Advanced" preference pane, you can choose the format for songs imported into iTunes. I personally find that AAC at 192 kbps w/ WBR is a good balance of small file size and good sound quality.
Delete anything that you've added and you don't need anymore.
Second, run iDupe to see if you have duplicated music.
Third, (since you said that your laptop is new) try DeLocalizer which will remove any languages that you do not use from OS X and free up space.
Good luck!