music files all over the place; in Organizing don't want to lose database
So this is a topic I feel has been beaten to death but I still can not find an answer to my issue. It concerns organizing music and eliminating duplicates, but has recently become much more complicated.
So I have been trying to get all my music into one folder for the last couple weeks. I had a the bulk of it in my itunes music folder, but the music I have obtained in the last couple months has been saved (I did not notice this till recently) to a different folder. When I have deleted music in itunes I have been under the assumption that the actual file is going to my trash (i know this only works if the file is in the folder being used in itunes) but because a lot of my new music is not in this folder I have ended up downloading multiple copies of it. Also, through some strange sequence of events all of my music files have managed to duplicate themselves. This means I have multiple duplicates on my computer. I tried movign everything to my external drive then deleting duplicates by organizing them by either their ...(1) tag or the date they were created. While doing all of this my computer crashed. So now after loading my recovered files I have a database that does not know where any of the music is, while the music is being contained in like six different folders. One of these folders is in the new itunes organizing format where it separates every artist into their own folder. So my question is how do I best go about getting all of the ACTUAL music files I have on my comp together into the itunes folder while MOST IMPORTANTLY not losing all of my music ratings and play counts?
(I know this question is probably confusing so please ask me questions about what I mean)
So I have been trying to get all my music into one folder for the last couple weeks. I had a the bulk of it in my itunes music folder, but the music I have obtained in the last couple months has been saved (I did not notice this till recently) to a different folder. When I have deleted music in itunes I have been under the assumption that the actual file is going to my trash (i know this only works if the file is in the folder being used in itunes) but because a lot of my new music is not in this folder I have ended up downloading multiple copies of it. Also, through some strange sequence of events all of my music files have managed to duplicate themselves. This means I have multiple duplicates on my computer. I tried movign everything to my external drive then deleting duplicates by organizing them by either their ...(1) tag or the date they were created. While doing all of this my computer crashed. So now after loading my recovered files I have a database that does not know where any of the music is, while the music is being contained in like six different folders. One of these folders is in the new itunes organizing format where it separates every artist into their own folder. So my question is how do I best go about getting all of the ACTUAL music files I have on my comp together into the itunes folder while MOST IMPORTANTLY not losing all of my music ratings and play counts?
(I know this question is probably confusing so please ask me questions about what I mean)
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.6)
