How to fix multiple major iTunes problems
I think I'm facing every problem (or almost) ever experienced with iTunes and want nothing to do with it anymore. I'm going to take my music offline and start using my own sync software.
I'm hoping someone has a good idea of the order in which to address the problems and what utility would help with a problem of this scope.
Here's my environment:
- ~15,000 song/2000 albums are listed in iTunes (~13,000 songs from CDs and 2,000 from iTunes) 39,000 files/3,800 folders are in the Music folder. It should be about 15,000 songs.
- I've had a Match subscription for last few years but recently saw it was turned off
- All music was installed and running on Windows 8 but I have a Mac available
- I own or have looked at many of the utilities for cleaning up libraries but from what I've seen, they all fall short of dealing with multiple problems at once.
- I've always 'kept the library organized' and assured everything is within the iTunes folder
- I don't backup my iTunes library files. I have a very efficient redundant backup system but never considered I would have to do anything other than backing up my entire iTunes folder since I never move anything.
- I have almost all my old CDs but could be missing 50-100 or so.
Here's the problems:
- ~1,000 songs from my CDs that are still only MPEG (can convert to AAC but they didn't automatically - small problem but I don't know if this is a sign of some other problem)
- Hundreds of albums have songs that are split up as follows (this is just an example but is typical):
-- 6 of 10 songs are on the correct album
-- 2 songs are on unknown album within the correct artist
-- 1 song is on some other album that shouldn't exist but within the correct artist
-- 1 song is on an album by itself with the cover art of an artist/album that I've never heard of. The same cover art appears on hundreds of different albums that also contain 1 or 2 songs from somewhere else.
- Thousands of songs are duplicated into up to 4 different files
-- Often up to 3 different encodings per song
-- Most duplicates are contained within the same album but some are not
-- Some are only renamed with the different extension; some with sequential [space] & number; some use underbar & number; and others only have a trailing space OR underbar.
-- Some songs have hexadecimal data in the comments but it converts to garbage
-- There are no exact duplicate songs
- I found that Family Sharing
Since I don't care about iTunes, it seems like it would be easiest to just duplicate the music folder then fix everything from within the folders but I'm just guessing. I also think that it would be easiest if there were a utility that would, for example, let me select an artist, so I could drag-and-drop and/or batch change metadata, but I haven't found one that gives that level of control.
Any ideas are greatly appreciated!