Duplicate MP3 files

After upgrading to the latest version of iTunes (11.0.1), I noticed that there are now duplicate MP3 files for all of the tracks for which Gracenote has found album artwork. While the duplicate tracks aren't visible as duplicates within iTunes, the duplicates are clearly visible within the source folders when I view them with Finder. In each case, the track that I had originally loaded is shown with the default "dual music note" icon, and the duplicate track is shown as "(song title) 1.mp3" with a miniature icon of the album artwork. How did this happen? How can I delete the duplicate entries in a systematic way, without doing it track-by-track for my entire library? How can I prevent this issue from recurring? My MP3 library is huge, so this duplication is eating up significant hard drive space.

whoa talk about duplicates. thanks for the link, i figured out how to "show duplicates" within itunes. i suppose what i'm looking for is a script for spotlight that will identify duplicates on my hard drive with the exact same name and either delete them for me, or give me an easier way to delete them myself (besides weeding through each mp3 and deleting whatever comes up twice)

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HELP!! How can I find and delete duplicate mp3 files.

I have a zillion copies of songs and I want to find and delete duplicate mp3 files. I have used MediaRage to find the duplicate files (16 thousand or so) but it can't delete them. It will take a million yrs to delete them manually. Does anyone know a way to do this quickly or a program that will do this for me. I have a 15 in Powerbook with OS 10.5.3
Thanks so much if you can help.

This site: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/ has hundreds of scripts (small programs that do stuff) for iTunes.
Bound to be something there for you.

Does iTunes duplicate mp3 files I import, thus doubling space used on mac?

Hello.
May be a silly question, but here goes:
When I import mp3's onto my mac (from my old computer), i put them all into one folder..
when i double click to play, they automatically play through itunes.. now i've noticed that itunes NOW ALSO creates a duplicate folder/file of those tunes that I have now played through iTunes, (in "user" > Music > iTunes > iTunes Music)...
does this mean that there are now 2 copies of the mp3 on my hardrive, therefore taking up space?? I'm not entirely sure - but would not be happy if every song actually takes up twice the amount of space...
Any help??
Thanks everyone!
Johnny

I'm having a similar problem. Just installed iTunes, first iPod product, and my file usage has dwindled by the size of the music files. They've all been doubled, it looks like. Where is this located, and how can I be sure not to move/delete the wrong ones?
Or, where is the setting to stop this, and if I change the setting do I need to re-install iTunes to get rid of the wasted file space?
Thanks.

Music plays in iTunes, but NONE of the MP3 files are visible in Explorer

This one is a bit of a mystery.
When I open up any of the folders in my iTunes Music folder, they appear to be empty. No MP3 files are listed at all. Yet, iTunes can still play the music.
Here are the details:
1. I keep my iTunes media content on an external hard drive, and iTunes is working fine. Some albums have disappeared but most of my music shows up in iTunes and plays properly. Therefore, the music files have to be there.
2. When I right-click on my iTunes folder in Windows Explorer and choose "properties" I get a result: Explorer scans the folder and tells me I have 98.8 gigabytes in 18,279 files, (though when I look around, I see that a LOT of albums are missing). Yet, Windows Explorer is finding a lot of files even though I can’t see them.
3. However, when I right-click on a folder inside my iTunes folder and choose “properties” (the folders for each artist and for each album are still there and still visible) I get weird results. It says that there is some small amount of data in each folder (27 kilobytes or 35 kilobytes) and some random number of files (2, or 5, or 6). It doesn't matter how many songs are actually on that album, it just gives me this small unrelated number. Yet, I can’t see any files listed at all.
4. Under the View tab in Folder Options, everything looks fine to me. I don’t see a setting there that would hide MP3 files.
5. I tried checking “show hidden files” and all that sort of thing, but nothing changed.
6. I did a virus scan and it revealed no threats.
7. I also went into the Command Prompt and used the dir command to see what was there. I could see all of my folders including my iTunes music folder. I have pictures, Word documents, Excel files, etc on this external folder as well. I can see all of these files no problem. I can also see all the Artist and Album folders in my iTunes music folder. However, even using the dir command, I can’t see any songs – there are no MP3 files visible. I reveal hidden and system files (dir /ah), I then see some files like these:
desktop.ini
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
Folder.jpg
8. I tried to play the music from VLC media player and Windows Media Player, but that doesn’t work because the files can’t be seen by those programs either.
9. However, when I open iTunes, all the music is there and playable. Only iTunes sees the music.
Anyone have any idea what could have happened? The one thing I changed recently is that I ran the iTunes Genius function. It scanned my music and did what it was supposed to do, and it worked fine. I doubt that Genius could have done this to my external hard drive. I’m guessing I picked up a computer virus somehow, but my virus scan doesn’t reveal anything.
Anyone have any ideas about what is going on?
Thanks!
Doug

OMG!!!!!!!!!!
You were absolutely right, Rob. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. I've got nearly 200 Artist folders with 1,000 or so Album folders - and they are all completely empty of music.
But in the middle of that long list of folders, there is an innocuous looking folder labelled "Music." I looked inside that folder and, bam, there they were - all 92 gigabytes of my missing music files in a complete copy of all those Artist and Album folders.
I thought I was going crazy! How could iTunes be playing all this music when as far as I could tell, it had all vanished? But there it was. As you said, iTunes had simply moved it down a level in the folder hierarchy and then didn't delete all the original folders.
And as I scanned the original list of Artist folders, I also saw the other folders: Podcasts, Audiobooks, iPod Games, etc. I hadn't even noticed them before. I just assumed that all the folders I was looking at were Artist folders.
Thank you so much, Rob. I'm not sure I would have ever solved this "case of the missing music files" on my own. I would have continued to bang my head against "hidden files" settings and all that. Perhaps I would have tracked these files down by looking for their location using "Get Info" in iTunes. But maybe not. I had no reason to suspect that I didn't know where the music files were: after all, the Artist and Album folders were all right there. They were just empty! I was so focused on the folders being empty, it never occured to me that iTunes had created exact duplicate folders somewhere else.
Do you know if iTunes had any practical reason for leaving all those empty folders behind? I'm just wondering if it is safe to manually delete them. I noticed, for example, that they aren't completely empty. They contain hidden files of Album Art and various ini files. I wouldn't want to delete them and then find out that I just deleted all my album art and a bunch of important settings files.
Thanks again. You saved my neck with this one.
Doug

How can I move mp3 files from trash to iTunes?

I accidently moved a group of MP3 files (songs) from my iTunes to the trash. After doing a little research, I saw the suggestion of creating a folder on my desktop and dragging them from the trash to the new desktop folder. So, I did that, and as far as I can tell, the songs are all there, sitting in the folder. But when I tried to drag the songs from the desktop folder to iTunes, I got this message:
"Attempting to copy the disk Macintosh HD failed. You do not have enough access privaleges for this operation."
This makes no sense to me. This is my private computer so I should have all the privaleges I need to do anything, right? And I'm not trying to copy the "disk Macintosh HD", right?
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Thanks!

ed2345,
Thanks! I did that and the songs are now back in my iTunes. Some of the songs went back to the podcast and some went to the playlist.
UNFORTUNATELY, the songs did some sort of massive duplicating so that there are now over 100 duplicates of every episode/song (the podcast now has almost 36,000 episodes/songs and the playlist now has over 24,000 episodes/songs), and iTunes is viery slow/sluggish (spinning beach ball). Can you tell me how to eleminate all of the duplicates?

Cannot open .wmv or .mp3 files with newly dowloaded Quicktime Pro 7.1.5

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I'm kinda new at this so forgive me if I'm a bonehead.
I made a contribute site, then wanted to disable check in
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Hi,
I have very limited experience with Automator, but my guess is it's not up to the task. I'm trying to do something similar in iTunes but the actions under Finder don't seem to work properly. ( If you select 'Find Finder Items' and set the Whose field to Extension and Is Equal To and use the parameter 'mp3' it seems to work as expected. If you set the Whose field to Name and Ends with it only returns directories.) I'm thinking I need to look into actual scripting. Anyone have thoughts on this?
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How do I combine/consolidate my MP3 files?

Dear Mac gurus,
I've got MP3 files scattered all over the place in different folders. I've tried copying, then moving chunks of files but now I've got a bunch of duplicates. Is there a "simple" way to organize all of my MP3 files into one folder once and for all?? (I've got over 5000). I searched this forum but couldn't find a discussion that fit my particular problem
Thanks in advance....

From a search using the itunes help menu - 'consolidate' is the search term.
*Copying all your iTunes files to one location*
<Depending on how you've imported songs, videos, and other items into iTunes, your library can include items that are located in various places on your computer's hard disk or other locations.
You can make sure that copies of all the files in your iTunes library are in your iTunes Music folder so that, for example, it's easier to move your library to a new computer.
To copy all your iTunes files to your iTunes Music folder:
Choose Advanced > Consolidate Library.
Any iTunes file located outside the iTunes Music folder remains in its original location, and a copy of it is placed in your iTunes Music folder.
I use the 'keep' and 'copy' functions enabled in iTunes prefs to avoid your problem.>
MJ

How do I store mp3 files on my IPOD but leave uncompressed files in iTunes?

I always buy uncompressed files and I want to keep them uncompressed in iTunes so I always have a copy of the best fidelity on my computer (for burning CD's). However I only want to store compressed files (MP3 or whatever other compression option is available) on my iPOD (or at least I want to be able to choose the format for my iPOD). I couldn't find a way to do this without changing the format of what is on my hard drive. Any ideas?
Thanks

I get duplicates when I convert my 320 kbps mp3 files to 128 kbps AAC files for my Nano. I'm not sure if I set something in my preferences to make sure the original file stays intact. Why don't you try converting one song (that you can reimport if necessary) to make sure that you get duplicates too. Just to be safe. If you don't get a duplicate, post back and I try to figure out how I have my iTunes set up to duplicate converted songs rather than replace them.

Are mp3 files seekable over RTMP with FMS 3.5?

I had an OSMF sample running on my dev laptop with Wowza Media Server because it's OSX. I use the following line to setup an mp3 stream over RTMP: var audio:AudioElement = new AudioElement(new NetLoader(), new URLResource(new URL(selectedMediaSource)));
With Wowza, the audio is seekable, but when I change over to FMS, the file still plays but the mediaPlayer is no longer seekable so the scrub bar doesn't work. The code is based off of the ExamplePlayer sample that ships with OSMF and uses a mediaPlayerWrapper to manage visibility of the controls in the UI.
Do I need something on the server side to allow the seek function? Is this not possible over FMS? Or is there just a much better way to code this?
Thanks.

Actually, it looks like mediaPlayer.seekable == true, but the file won't seek. The easiest way to duplicate the problem is just to use the ExamplePlayer sample and modify the 'AllExamples.as' file. You can change the URL to point to any mp3 file in an FMS streaming directory for the "Streaming Audio" example.
It seems like the easiest fix is to convert the mp3 file to an flv and the seek function works again. I would rather not convert all of the mp3 files to flv, but at least it's functional. My guess is that FMS does not send the duration of the file for the mp3 format so the player can't seek.

How can I have iTunes find its newly converted mp3 files?

Hi,
I am not a power user. I have a playlist that is apparently composed of different file formats. So when I tried to burn them to a CD it gave me 92 songs that could not be burned as an mp3. I then chose to convert them to mp3. It apparently did it because I looked for the files in finder and saw the mp3 versions.
How can I now have iTunes use THOSE new mp3 files for burning? There must be a simple way to do that.
Thanks,
Jorge

Thanks Jim,
Is there any way to list them by "type"? I made the playlist from several playlists and I am sure that some of the offending songs are from several of those playlists.
I tried tricking iTunes into writing them onto a cd by just dumping the new MP3 duplicates into the same list and then telling it to burn. I then expected it to tell me the same 92 songs could not be written and planned to just tell it to skip those since now had them in as MP3s but it is now telling me that it will require more than one CD. Is that because the files are now bigger or because it is counting the 92 files that it will not be writing anyway?
Thanks,
Jorge

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AAC is Advanced Audio Coding. Basically it's a format that sounds better than MP3 but doesn't take up as much space as a lossless format (like you'd have on a CD). More than likely you've had that encoding turned on when you ripped your music into itunes (it's the default encoder). Therefore your LG phone won't play them.
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Hi William.
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Verify/repair the startup disk (not just permissions), as described here:
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I just purchased to songs to put on my child's Leappad 2 MP3 player and I can see the songs under my music files but cannot save them because they were not downloaded as a MP3 file What can I do?

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Duplicate MP3 files

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