Need help sorting /consolidating music. 3 external hard drives 25000+ songs

i have 3 external hard drives 1 terabite each. over 2000 complete albums. i may have 20 different folders or files of music spread over each drive. how do i clean up the music. example (folder a)has 700 albums and 1000 single songs by various artists, including 5 single copies of the song back in black by ac/dc. this folder includes 9 full ac/dc albums. (folder b) has 1500 albums and 2000 singles and has 14 ac/dc albums when i run (folder a) thru itunes and it completes and all music data shows. i then will run (folder b) thru i tunes, but i do not want 9 ac/dc back in black singles off the album back in black, nor do i want 2 complete back in black albums, 2 highway to **** albums and so forth, i want itunes to only install the 5 albums that are not in (folder a). please help.

Welcome to the Apple discussions.
You may want to consider posting this question in the iTunes discussion area at http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=149
It sounds like you don't currently back up your hard drive, and if your iTunes library is that important to you, you should figure out how to back it up now. Easiest way is to buy an external drive larger than your existing internal hard drive, get a program like SuperDuper, which is what I use, and copy your drive to the external backup. Then you can point iTunes to it to use the library there. SuperDuper can be found at http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
I prefer an external hard drive with a firewire connection, so I can boot from it if need be (a Powerbook can't boot from a USB device). If you do get an external hard drive with only a USB connection, then it would be good for it to have it's own power supply since some drives can't get enough power from the Powerbook USB to start or work properly.

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baltwo wrote:
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Stats and Errors I received:
http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m153/LordKirkenMorder/Snapshot2009-11-1202-04-32.jpg

BDAqua wrote:
If you have the SW copied off it...
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My MacBook Pro hard drive is almost full and I wish to store my Aperture Library on an external drive, how do I do this and is the use of USB2 suitable or do I need to use a Firewire external hard drive?

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Hi,
The issue is that I have a very outdated labtop with limited storage space. Wanting to expand my music collection, I downloaded music. However, I soon ran out of hard drive space so I purchased a large external hard drive. To add to the complication, I then purchased a new ipod. The problem is that I am unable to get itunes to work with this configuration. I contacted technical support but recieved no helpful advice.
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If I understand your goal correctly, you're considering using Time Machine as external storage, and it doesn't work that way. Time Machine keeps around what it can, and older stuff gets flushed as the storage available to Time Machine reaches its lower threshold due to the addition of newer stuff. When the older stuff gets flushed is not predictable.
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Need help sorting /consolidating music. 3 external hard drives 25000+ songs

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