Music Folder Bloating

I am a new MacBook owner, long time iTunes user. For the longest time I have used iTunes and 2 iPods (shuffle and 20gb upgraded recently to a 60gb). My iPod was what made me fall in love end eventually buy a MacBook. I got my MacBook custom made with a 120GB hard drive and proceeded to import about 30GB of music.
All was fine until a week later when I was getting warning that my hard drive was full! It turned out that the 30GB of music I had suddenly created a Music folder of around 70GB, I could hardly believe it. I want to let iTunes take care of my music folders and organise everything for me, but since then I have had to switch off all automatic options and manually handle the folders myself.
Can anyone tell me what options are good to use and what are bad? It seems that my ~/Music/iTunes/ folder is populated with duplicate music of the ~/Music/ folder and various other bloat bugs. I have all my music stored on an external hard drive, but I want to be able to import it to my MacBook and let iTunes take care of everything without the pain of bloating.

I don't think its iTunes. Windows says my music folder is 27 GB, but itunes says its 20 GB. The reason is that there is 7 GB of files in my music folder which isn't in itunes.
If you delete files from itunes, it ask if you want to keep the file. If you say yes, the file stays in the music folder. If you do this enough, there is a disparity in the values. Also, itunes doesn't use wma files, but will convert them. If these wma files are in your music folder they will account for the space occupied, but itunes will not recognize them.

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See iTunes: How to move your music to a new computer
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I've used that method to transfer music from one drive to another literally dozens of times and never seen it fail in the way you experienced. I'm at a loss to explain how you could have followed the instructions, successfully transfer the music to the new drive, and yet have the iTunes database still think the music should be on the original drive.
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Fast fix but loses the meta data: Quit iTunes. Open your home directory, find the music folder and open it. Trash everything you see in your music folder and restart iTunes. All your music and playlists will be gone. Open your new drive on the desktop, find the folder with your music, and drag it into your iTunes window. Your music will be imported into a new iTunes catalog and then you can create your playlists.
Keeping the metadata: After quitting iTunes, move the music back to its original location by dragging the music folder(s). Unmount the new drive and play some music. Remember the songs you clicked on and showed iTunes how to find? Do those songs all over again and once you've verified the iTunes library now points to all the songs properly, delete the songs from the new drive and repeat the steps to move them again.

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Hey. I have all my albums stored in a My Music folder, some are labelled fully (Artist - Album) as the folder name, while others are simply the artist, the album or what have you. As I load new albums onto my computer, I just do a manual "add folder to iTunes" each time. I checked both Keep ITunes Music Folder Organized and Copy Files to iTunes Music Folder when Adding, and it prompts me to copy all the files over. I've tried this a few times, using My Music as the folder, and other locations, but it only ever copies like, ten of my three-hundred odd albums.. I want it to copy ALL my music and organize it accordingly, but it won't.. What gives?

Hi Jen, welcome to discussions
iTunes always manages the music folder in that way (\[artistname]\[albumname]\[title]).
To keep it from splitting up your albums with several different artist, check "part of a compilation" in the info tab (right-click->get info). Now those albums will appear in one folder (\compilations\[albumname]\[title])

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After I imported music of the album "Wings Of Song", by James Galway, from my removable hard disk to "iTunes Music Folder" and had iTunes organized it, I discovered something that's a little bit wierd. All the music I just imported is put under the folder Compilation\Wings of Song. This means that when iTunes organizing the music folder, it unexpectedly "thought" all these music are by the artist Compilation. What is the reason? Could anyone tell me why? Thank you!

The Compilation directory is how iTunes organizes albums that Gracenote (CDDB) considers works of various artists or collections of songs from the same artist, but differing albums (like "Best Of's" or "Greatest Hits").
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All of the files couldn't find the source files, unless I pointed to them one by one.
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And when I just went to open iTunes again, all my libraries don't even show.
I'm afraid to plug in my ipod for synching until I get this straight, for fear of messing that up too.
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Compaq Presario Windows XP Notebook.
Compaq Presario Windows XP Notebook.

To move your iTunes music to an external drive...
1 Quit iTunes.
2 Move the entire iTunes folder including music to
the external drive.
In point #2 do you mean move the entire Program File folder of iTunes or just the "My Documents" iTunes library folder?
I have a full laptop, a big iPod and an external HD, I am trying to figure out how to store my library on the HD, but access it as if it were on the laptop.
I moved my iTunes library to the HD and then in iTunes I used the "add folder to library" function, but it brought all of the song files back onto the laptop.
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the help documents on the apple page just show me how to move my music, which is in the right place, but not the database xml and covers...

Move the iTunes Library elsewhere, launch iTunes with the Shift key held down, and point it there.
(60614)

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I have iTunes version 7.1 running on a notebook with Windows Vista. My iTunes music folder is becoming too large for the C; drive and I am having problems successfully moving it to the D: drive.
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Firstly there is more than one kind of iTunes Library file:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93732
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http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iTunesMac/7.3/en/670x.html
The following link will give you the instructions to move iTunes to an EHD. These instructions need to be followed EXACTLY.
The 2 metadata files within the main iTunes folder must stay on the main drive of your system as that is their "home", they can't be moved.
Now read this:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301748

Music Folder Bloating

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