New mac user, transferring music from my old pc

[sharkman]

Hello so i just bought a new macbook and i am having some issues putting all my music onto it from my pc. I put some music on an old external hard drive and then tried to put it on my mac, but almost all of the music files coped two times onto the mac. Now i have a whole bunch of music, two of each song.

any advise on what to do?
should i delete all the music on my mac and start over?

[sharkman]

By the way, the way i did it was just copy the folder that it was in on the extrenal and copy it onto the hard drive in the finder. Wrong approach?

[robduckyworth]

to get rid of duplicates, import your songs into itunes: drag them on top of the itunes window. it will take a while to import. then go to file - library - organise library - consolidate files (this puts all your music into the right place for itunes to find it).

then go into itunes, file, display duplicates. it will show you all songs that have two copies. have fun deleting away.

(someone may chip in with a better way to do this, but this is how i would do it.)

[jkr77]

Rob is right - just having gone through this exact same thing this week. The 'Display Duplicates' option is extremely useful especially if you have compilations wherein the same song may be appearing more than once.

[sharkman]

Thanks guys i was able to delete all of the duplicates, but now I started to copy more music (and I have a lot) and it still copies two of each file! I am dragging it onto itunes from an external like you guys said. Any suggestions on how to solve this

[randili]

I posted before, but somehow my post doesn't show up. whatever...

I agree, just add all the songs (make sure that iTunes just adds the files to the library, without copying them, you can set or unset this in the "Advanced" tab of the preferences).

After that you have maybe some duplicates in your library. For this you can use different tools. The iTunes' "display duplicates" option is not really helpful. I have written some scripts that might help you. My approach is that two tracks are duplicates if they have the same artist, the same album and the same title. The script then deletes duplicates from the iTunes library, i.e. the actual file on your hard drive is not touched at all.

Have a look here:

Randy's Träume: Cleaning up your iTunes library (on a mac)

After that you can just consolidate, like the other guys suggested.

Hope that helps...

Cheers
Randili