Multiple Files On Mac

I noticed my hard drive was dwindling extremely fast so I did a little looking around on the system and found that many of my movies were on my hard drive twice. Once in an iTunes folder and again in a Movies folder. I deleted the one in the movies folder and the movie still plays in iTunes so it was just a duplicate. My question is, why does the Mac do this? Is there any way I can stop it from making duplicate files? Thanks

If you let iTunes manage your music/movie library, it adds all the files that you added to iTunes to its own folder in the iTunes Music folder, located in your Music folder. It does not move the files, but simply copies them. That's why iTunes still plays them. if you delete the movies or music from the iTunes Music Library folder, then they won't appear on your play list anymore and won't play in iTunes until you add them again. I'm pretty sure it copies them even if you manage your library yourself. It is safe to add them to iTunes, then delete the original file wherever you saved it, in this case, the Movies folder.

iTunes does exactly the same thing with music, I keep finidng I am having to delete the duplicates, It's also the same story on the PC version of iTunes, this is something Apple should sort out!

Open Perferences in Itunes and go to the tab in the picture. Uncheck "Copy files to iTunes music folder". It will leave the file where you put it and not make a copy.

Wow that is something I have never noticed before!

or just do what i do and let iTunes do its thing then delete the music where you opened it from.

You can still get to your music easily by clicking on the file you want in iTunes and then selecting "Show in Finder"

inflexion said:

or just do what i do and let iTunes do its thing then delete the music where you opened it from.

You can still get to your music easily by clicking on the file you want in iTunes and then selecting "Show in Finder"

Click to expand...

That's exactly what I do. I think when I setup my WIntel macheen again, I might make it so it doesn't put it into the iTunes music library, if it isn't already, it's been over 2 months since I've used a wintel machine on a regular basis. I've only used one since I moved and that was to backup my xbox games.

its easy to reconfig, as shown in the picture above. i kinda like the feature, cause when i add files to my iTunes library, then they are automatically put in that folder and i can delete the ones i added to iTunes. Kinda keeps everything same format and all in one spot.

and if you dont like it, you can easily turn the feature off

Yeah. I like the feature, too, honestly, since I don't really listen to any illegal music, and I only have a few movies. It's nice to have everything together. iPhoto, on the other hand, which also does this, gets a bit frustrating as it's not an option, and it's got a confusing allocation system.

I agree with the iphoto thing. It's system is so useless, that without opening the app it's pretty impossible to fetch a picture, or just browse them in the finder.

Doesn't bug me much, because can browse them with iphoto itself and find specific ones with spotlight.