|
August 13, 2007
iTunes Library Syncing
I'm hoping someone out there has a solution for me on this little situation I'm having with iTunes. Basically over the last few years I've developed some very fragmented iTunes Library files and I'm trying to put them all together in one place without doing each song by hand and without ending up with hundreds of duplicates. Right now I have: - 1 external hard drive filled with MP3 files, some of which are included in the iTunes Library, some of which are not. - 1 internal hard drive with MP3 files which are included in the iTunes Library, some of which are dupes of files on the external drive, but most of which are not. What I'd like to do is consolidate those into one place, all of which would be included in the iTunes Library, and then I can make a perfect back up of it on the external. My problem is this: When I try to combine the two sources iTunes copies the identical songs which results in 2, 3, sometimes 4 copies of the exact same same -all of which then need to be deleted by hand. If this was one or two albums I'd just bite the bullet and do that, but we're talking about over 30GB of music and potentially hundreds and hundreds of dupes. Anyone have any ideas on a pain free way to unify all of this? Posted by sean on August 13, 2007 11:50 AM | View blog reactions
Previous Entry: Offline-ish this week Next Entry: links for 2007-08-14 Why not combine all the files, rebuild the library, and then turn on the Display Duplicates option. This will only show duplicate tracks which can then easily be deleted. Posted by: fhdogs on August 13, 2007 12:27 PM
That's the problem, they are not easily deleted. You need to delete each one manually, which when you have thousands of songs isn't a really good option. Posted by: sean bonner on August 13, 2007 12:43 PM
Since we're talking about this sort of scale, I think you would be best served by visiting Doug's Applescript Archive: What I have noticed is this: with dupes you kind of have to at least check the tags, if you have live tracks or a slightly different track (demo, acoustic) on another album, you don't want to delete those usually...but if they are exact then by all means go for it. Good luck! Posted by: Banana Lee Fishbones on August 13, 2007 01:22 PM
You're kinda fucked. I had to do that too. It's a nightmare. You might want to just do the copies and run SpringCleaning on it to flag the dupes. Not a cheap option either. Yeah, you're still kinda fucked. Posted by: Jason D- on August 13, 2007 05:19 PM
Isn't this where you pay someone in India to sort out your music library while you sleep, so you can work 4 hours or whatever? Posted by: Michael on August 13, 2007 10:27 PM
I've never used it, but DupeGuru ME is a $20 utility designed for just this problem -- http://www.hardcoded.net/dupeguru_me/ Posted by: Fuzzy on August 14, 2007 10:32 AM
Sean, here's what I do (I'll try to keep it brief). I have all my music (300+ gigs) on a FireWire drive attached to my MacBook Pro. That is my main iTunes library. For backups, I rsync all of the music to a FreeBSD server that I have in my house. That way a hard failure of my firewire disk won't have me losing any music. I do this sync anything I make any changes to the library (adding things, removing things, updating tags, etc.). I also rsync the iTunes Library file in addition to the music files. And now for the problem you have... First thing you want to do is make one directory will all the music exists. Do this using rsync to sync one directory on top of the other. Then drag the iTunes Music directory onto itunes so anything that isn't already in there is added. I have a second computer at work where I like to have all the music as well. Over the internet, I use rsync to sync the music to that machine. The only issue is that when you do the rsync, it copies all the files over to the second machine, but it doesn't update the iTunes library file. So once all the music is synced over and on the disk, I drag my iTunes Music library onto iTunes. It then imports any music that is not already in the library. Any tracks that are in the library already are unchanged. Hope this helps. I've been doing this for a while and it's working very well so please tell me if you have any questions or run into any problems. /l Posted by: Lukwam on August 15, 2007 12:43 PM
Post A Comment |
This is a single entry on a blog written by me, Sean Bonner. Please feel free to look around or even join in whatever conversation might be going on. Or don't. See if I care.
|
|
|
|
|
Unless noted all content by Sean
Bonner and published under a Creative
Commons License |
