My Music and iTunes

I added one cd's worth of music to the 'My Music' folder. I started iTunes, and played the files in iTunes, then burned a cd using iTunes.
Then I was poking around in Finder and noticed that the music in the My Music folder had been duplicated in the iTunes folder.

Can I expect this behavior all the time?

Can I safely delete the file in the My Music folder?

I also noticed that Aperture does the same thing.

Can someone please explain this to me. I want to properly manage my files without bloating my Hard Drive unnecessarily.

Thank you
-Mark (Noob)

regardless of where you place your music, by default music will be copied in to the itunes folder set in the itunes preferences.

If you want itunes to play and manage your music, leave the copy in the itunes folder and get rid of the other files.

It all depends on how you want itunes to handle your music files

iTunes manages the music for you, so you can go ahead and delete the first music folder. that's right, drag it to the trash.

It does this, so not to cause problems with moved files

louishen said:

regardless of where you place your music, by default music will be copied in to the itunes folder set in the itunes preferences.

If you want itunes to play and manage your music, leave the copy in the itunes folder and get rid of the other files.

It all depends on how you want itunes to handle your music files

Click to expand...

You can stop this by simply telling iTunes to not copy it in. It's in iTunes prefs.

Whenever I aquire new music, I goto itunes and tell it to add the files and artwork. Then delete the original files.

Go into your itunes music dir, and see how organized it is.