Music files / itunes conversion - making it simple!

Hello
I am looking for some general and probably simple help with the file formats of my music.
I have a vast amount of music which is stored on my computer hard drive, some of which is stored in m4p format and some in wma and some in mp3? Some of my music files are stored twice and some are in different formats. When i convert my music to itunes i find that most of the music converts 3, 4 and sometimes 5 times? I dont understand this!
I really want to have a simple system for storing and converting music. If my music is to be stored on my hard drive i just want each music file stored once and in the same file format so when i search my music it is easy to find the artist i want. With itunes i just want the music to convert once. This all may seem very simple to someone but to me i feel like i have a complicated system and i just want to tidy it up and make it easy to manage. Can anybody help! Thank you.

I really do not understand what all the different formats are so even trying to talk about this is difficult but i will try. I have all my music stored on my hard drive but it seems to be in different places. When i click on my music i have a number of artists listed with their music. I then have a folder in this section called itunes which has also got a big list of artists in it which seems strange. So i have one big music folder with all the music in plus an itunes folder with a lot of the music in also. Do i need to just copy all of the music to the itunes folder on my hard drive?
When i use itunes to organise my music i click on file and then add folder to library and then send all the music in the folder 'my music' to itunes. Obvisouly i have just done this once at the start. When i add the folder a pop up comes with - some files are not in the itunes format, do you want itunes to convert them for you. When itunes has finished adding and converting i have 4 or 5 copies of each track in the itunes library??? I then have to use the delete duplicate option to get rid of tracks. When i then take my music to other computers and want to copy it into itunes it does the same so it seems to be a problem with the files on the hard drive.
Ideally, i would like one copy of each music file in my hard drive plus when i copy to itunes it just copies once. Also when i take this music to a seperate computer i want it to copy into the itunes library once.
If you require further info then no problem
I appreciate your time and help
Thank you.

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