20" Imac Core Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.6)
Your lack of tact was a little bit insulting, regardless of when it happened. No big deal though. I digress.
Since you cannot view folders in iTunes, you cannot delete folders thru iTunes.
You could put all the songs you want to delete into a playlist then select all the songs and Command Delete to delete them all at once.
That's the point. There should be an easier way. But putting them into a playlist before deleting them would be even more work than just deleting them the first time you click them. So this isn't really helpful either.
Ed's answer was helpful because he addressed the concerns of the original poster. But it also illustrated the need for iTunes programmers to include a feature to remove a folder from your iTunes library as easily as you can add them. If the best way to remove 200GB worth of music from your itunes library is to change the file extensions, then click to delete every single file with an exclamation point next to it; there is quite simply a flaw in design.
Apple iTunes programmers need to make the adjustment. Right next to the "File" command: "Add folder to library", you could have a command to "Remove folder from library." Or a "Manage Library" option would be great. Itunes obviously knows what folders it's library consists of so why not allow it to populate a list of them with the option to deselect undesired folders? Why hasn't this been done in one of the numerous iTunes updates? Is it really that hard to understand?
Phil Sattele wrote:
So, let me get this straight:
It takes 30 seconds to add a folder to your library and 30 hours to remove that folder from your library?
Instead of deleting thousands of files in iTunes, why can't I just remove the folder?
Because iTunes does not use the folders you made. It uses songs by Artist & Album and puts them in Artist/Album folders.
if you don't want this, turn off Copy items to iTunes media folder when adding to library.
My duplicates are actually iTunes folders. The 3 directories that are dupes are:
All folders that iTunes created.
I removed the files from locations 1 & 2
I get an "!' in the first column next to the song name. If I could sort on this field I'd be all set......
I had the same problem. I forgot I had my external hard drive plugged into the PC. I copied everything to the PC then did the iTunes scan, so every song showed up twice. Once on the PC and once on the external.
Here's what I did to fix it. I deleted from iTunes (not from the computer) every single song and then did a "Add Folder to Library" for the Music folder on the PC while the external HD was NOT plugged in this time.
Not very elegant, but it worked.
It doesn't solve the problem but one way of removing the broken links or folders you don't want, is to sort the list of songs by date added.
> Click songs
> Right click one of the column headings
> Select Date Added
Once the column is there, left click on the column heading and it will sort all your songs by the date they were added to the library. This should show the songs all together so you can highlight them and delete in bulk.
Removing folder from itunes library
