iTunes Duplicate Folder

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Hi there.

I'm going to try and sum this problem up as short as i can. I have a fairly large music collection (around 40GB) and is working wonders for me. But i noticed the other day that my music folder is taking up 80GB of space on my hard drive. This is obviously my music folder and the iTunes music folder...

I have a couple of questions.....

1. Why the **** does iTunes keep a copy of all your music
2. How can i get rid of this duplicate folder without losing all of my iTunes information

I know that within iTunes preferences there is a box to un-tick that doesn't copy files to the iTunes media folder when adding to the library, but because i have over 7000 songs already duplicated, un-ticking this wont do anything.

My initial thought on how to resolve this was to back up my music collection and remove the both music folders and re-import my folder back into iTunes whilst un-ticking the box for copying to the iTunes media file.

I was wondering if anyone has any better suggestions?

Thanks

Jonathan
 

chscag

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If you value your music collection you should first back it up to an external hard drive. I don't know how much of it is owned media (CDs, and so forth) but 40 GB of music is a lot of $$ invested to have it all gone because you had a hard drive failure.

As for your suggestion about how to resolve the space problem (80 GB), I agree it would be best to back it up and then copy back to the HDD. That would serve two purposes. (see above)

Regards.
 
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I have a similar issue. When moving my music from my old Mac via external, 29 GB somehow turned into 70 GB on the new one. I've also noticed that if I have an album in my Downloads folder and I drag + drop into Music, it duplicates the files.
 
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I was also annoyed about iTunes making duplicates of my music. As you guys have mentioned if you have a large music collection it can fill up your hard drive real quick. First backup everything as mentioned.

This is what I did to solve the problem. As you have mentioned uncheck the copy files in iTunes' advanced section in its preferences. After that I changed the iTunes media folder to the folder I have all my music. I prefer using my own folder because I can put the folder in a more convenient location.

After that I deleted all the duplicates in the iTunes default folder which is the Music folder located in your "account name" folder. Make sure you have all your music in your new folder before deleting. Now all you have to do is re-add all your songs to the library. To make sure the songs are the ones from your new folder just right-click a song and choose Get Info and at the bottom it tells you the folder it's in. Once everything is okay you can delete all the duplicate songs in the trash.
 
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Thank you for the tips. :) I unchecked the copy option (can't imagine why that would exist in the first place!).

I have a HUGE fear of deleting originals and my organization certainly has not been up to par so I may have to do this manually. It might take a year but I get nervous when DaisyDisk tells me the folder I moved over was 26 GB...but iTunes is 34.7 GB. Headache ahoy.
 

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