Fixing duplicate/triplicate folders and songs in itunes music folder

The file structure of my music has gotten out of control.
I keep all of my music on a lacie external drive.
I think i used to import music into itunes incorrectly and
there ended up being duplicates of files and folders.
for some artists, i have seven folders that have between
them (typically in an illogical order) all of the music i
have for that artist.
is there a simple fix for reorganizing everything without
painstakingly going through every artist and every folder?
please help!

My music files were created long befor I had itunes, but I have been usinfitunes for about 10 months. I recently noticed that my music file has gone from about 3,500 tracks to almost 9,000 tracks the change being duplicates. itunes will identify the duplicates but does not have the capability to clean up the database.
getting rid of about 5,000 duplicates is going to be a giant task and before I do it I would like to know how it happened and be comfortable it won't happen again. I just checked my preferences and I have selected "keep ... music folder organized".
My music data base is on an external hard drive and part of a home network. Sometimes I have added music from various computers on the network. when I want to update the library on one of the other computers I have erased all music in the library and then added the music data base to the itunes on the computer attached to the external hard drive. Is that where the duplication takes place?
Help ...
epmdallas

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How can I add songs to itunes music folder without them being duplicated within the folder (not on my hard drive)?

I have music files all over the place and want to put them all in itunes with no duplicates and get rid of all the rest. how can I do that? Some of my playlists are missing songs. I would like to move the playlist back to itunes from my ipod without having to put the songs in my media folder yet again! I have wasted so much time fooling with this. Really what I am trying to get at through all of this is to run the songs on the ipod through ivolume so they play equally.
Can anyone make sense of this for me?

It sounds like you have a few different problems.
To find all your music, try using a spotlight search. Type "kind:music" in the spotlight search (the magnifying glass in the far upper-right corner ) then choose "show all in finder". You'll end up with a window that shows all your music files, regardless of where they are on your hard drive. But don't move any files, because that may confuse iTunes (it won't be able to find files that you move, because - d'oh! - you moved them and now they're not where iTunes left them. That's usually how people end up in the kind of situation that you're in.)
If you want to let iTunes organize your music for you, make sure those options are turned on in the iTunes preferences (in the "advanced" section), then go to the "File" menu, choose "Library" and then choose "Organize library". That will put all your music in the iTunes Library folder (but leave copies of the originals wherever they were, all over your hard drive).
To find duplicates in your iTunes Library, choose "display duplicates" (or hold down the option key and it changes to "display exact duplicates" which might help in some cases). You'll still have to manually go through them to delete one of each duplicate.
Now you can start combining those three techniques - if you consolidate your music and let iTunes copy everything into the music folder, you'll know that iTunes safely has a copy of all your music in the iTunes Library folder. So you can do the spotlight search, and delete any duplicate files that are not in your iTunes library folder. Anything that's left over (that is, it's not a duplicate and it's not in the itunes music folder), you'll need to add to iTunes (try using the "automatically add to itunes" folder - spotlight search to find it - anything you drop in there will get added to iTunes without leaving a duplicate file). Then you can use the itunes "duplicates" feature to find the duplicates in iTunes and fix those.

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Maybe I need to expand and clarify a bit.
In my "user/music/itunes music" folder there are songs located in folders listed by artist/album. Some of these songs show up in the iTunes browser. I'm assuming this is due to my recent migration from my old Powerbook to my new Macbook Pro.
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Of course you can always go into your preferences @
Edit>Preferences>Advanced
and put a check next to Keep itunes music organized and copy files to itunes music folder when adding to library.
This way you can just add your new music to your library and it will automatically put it in your itunes folder for you all nice and neat like then you can delete the other music files from your limetunes music folder to keep you from having duplicates on your computer. Its a nice way to consolidate all your music into one easy to backup location
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I recently found that I have missing files in my iTunes music folder. The missing songs seem to be random. For instance, Abby Road is missing tracks 3 and 6. My music folder is on my main hard drive and I also have a Time Capsule backup.
When I look for the songs in my backup disk, I find I have to go back as far as 4 months to restore some of them and I just now found a song that was there yesterday but gone today. This leads me to believe that a few songs are randomly being deleted every day. Anyone else with this problem?
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redcore,
I got an answer from AppleCare on this one and it seems to be working as I have not noticed any more lost songs. The first person I talked to had never heard of this but his boss had and told me I needed to create a new iTunes music folder. This is a bit of a pain, but not as bad as going through TimeMachine to replace all the random, missing files (that part took a while).
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Can I--should I--combine the newer iTunes Media folder--new since 10.5.1--and the older iTunes Music folder? I just realized all my new songs are going into the Media folder, and I kind of like the simplicity of everything being in one, not two, folders.

Most of my music--the VAST majority--is in iTunes Music, but all the new songs are going into iTunes Media, which is new, I think, since 10.5.1.

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At guess you've used a different profile name. Files inside the media folder have survied the transfer, but those outside are expected to be on the same absolute file paths, but no longer are.
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tt2

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When in advanced iTunes preferences, I change the iTunes Music Folder location to that of the external drive and click "Change".
Okay. iTunes will use that folder for everything in the future. Anything added to iTunes will put into that folder if you have *Copy to iTunes music folder when adding to library* ticked.
If there is any previous items in iTunes, it will continue to look for them where they were.
I thought it might be an XML issue, so I moved the XML file but it didn't change anything.
The .xml is generated by iTunes simply for other applications. iTunes does not use it at all.
Is the "Add to Library" option my next best bet?
It's the only option since this is how you add files to iTunes (along with Import when RIPping from CD).
If you want to have the items in the new location in iTunes, you need to File -> Add to library and select the location on the external.
I'm ok with that as long as it doesn't actually add the files to my internal hard drive
See 1st comment in this response.
and keeps all of the items sorted correctly
Depends.
The sort in iTunes is whaichever column you are selected on.
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Everything SEEMED to have looked good. Or so I hoped.
The 40+ applications I bought are no longer listed on the Applications purchased list. Further, all my files are STILL saving to the c: drive.
How do I FORCE iTunes to acknowledge that the D:\ drive is storing my iTunes preferences and files?!

OK, now I get what you're trying to do. I think!
I run my ITL file off my exHD, so all my Artwork & Applications are stored there. I think if you try running your ITL file from the D: drive it will do what you want.
Try this
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Maybe I was not clear enough in my explanation with some trouble in my iTunes (8.0.2 now).
Sometime iTunes loose the link to a song file. A question mark appear next the song, iTunes ask to recreate the missing link.
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Time to time, I notice, some Artist Folder became empty. Maybe the first step to a missing link or something worst ?...
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While looking at some of the dupliates - I noticed that there were some Triplicates !!!
For some reason there are copies of *Many* Songs under user/me/MyMusic/ATunes/ItunesMedia/Music !!!
$%^$^@^!(@&)*!_(#&^%#^$%@#

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Try delete those songs using iTunes by de-selecting and sync. After that mark those songs and sync again.

Fixing duplicate/triplicate folders and songs in itunes music folder

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