Advice on moving Albums from old Library to a new Library

Hi,
I have a huge old iTunes library which has music which has been copied in and also imported over the years using various quality of MP3 settings. Much of this music I do not have the original CD’s, so I want to keep those particular old MP3 files even if they are not great quality.
There are also many ‘single songs’ that iTunes thinks are albums, and also some tunes which iTunes cannot find the source files.
Safe to say that this huge iTunes library is in a mess, but there is some very good irreplaceable music in it.
I also have approx. 2,000 CD’s which I wish to re-import using AIFF format.
My plan is to create a new iTunes library, and to somehow move all the music for which I don’t have CD’s for, into this new iTunes library.
And then after that, to manually import all the CD’s using AIFF format into the new library.
And then to delete the old library, and continue then with a nice clean library.
Can anybody recommend a good work flow to select a huge number of albums from the old library, and move them to the new one?
Any advice appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Dave

I would never have thought of using playlists.
Is that practical adding more than a thousand albums to a playlist?
And then to drag the playlist to "new media folder's Automatically Add to iTunes folder using your current library".
Presumably copying many thousands of files at once?
And ttg27... thanks for the pointers to the tt2's scripts.... sounds very useful.
Could either of you comment on a new idea I have had.....
Keep the old iTunes open and work down through the list of albums in iTunes one at a time.
Any album that I want to move (as I don't have the corresponding CD), i move that folder using explorer to the new disk drive. [by MOVING rather than copying, then those tunes in iTunes will appear as 'missing' so i know these have been moved already.
Any single tracks (identified as an album with 1 track) that I don't want to keep, I just delete it within iTunes (or Explorer) as I work down through the list.
So gradually the old iTunes library becomes smaller and smaller, as the content files are either moved or deleted.
Would that work and would it be safer that moving files in batches using Playlists?
By the way, is there some easy way that I can count the number of albums that I have in my iTunes library so that at least I will have an idea of how much work is ahead of me ? ;-)
Thanks for your suggestions!,
Really appreciated.
Dave

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Written by Kappy with additional contributions from a brody.
Revised 1/6/2009
Message was edited by: Kappy

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