Q: Mass Deleting Missing (Duplicate Files) from Library

Hi Carolyn,

Have you found the answer to this? My wife's iTunes was lost on a failed external hard drive. I copied to a new drive from her iPod with Media Widget's Easy Ipod Transfer, which worked, but now the iTunes library has one listing of each tune pointing to the old location and one pointing to the new location.

Thanks,

Mike

To create a playlist of songs which have no native file, there is a very simple way to do that:

1- Create a regular playlist, not a smart playlist. For this example, call the playlist "Alive".

2- Select all tracks in your main library and *drag them* into "Alive". Note that "dead" tracks with no native file will not appear in this playlist.

3- Create a smart playlist defined as: Playlist -- Is Not -- Alive. Call this playlist "Dead".

You now have a list of "!" songs which are missing their native files. This won't fix the tracks, but it identifies them for you in case you want to delete them from your library. To do that, select all songs in the "Dead" playlist and press the Shift key as you delete (Option-Delete on a Mac).

*Adding new items/removing orphans*
Try iTunes Folder Watch or iTunes Library Updater. Folder Watch is much faster on the adding files front, can be set to run in the background and includes a useful exclusion feature, however it’s slow at removing orphans. iTLU is better for this although doing it manually after looking at a list of proposed removals generated by Folder Watch is probably faster still. iTLU can also be set to update iTunes when you've used 3rd party tools to change tag info.

You may need to amend the list of file types these programs look for. My list includes:



Note the last 7 types may not be recognised as already being in the library so should either be omitted from the search or you can add (at least for Folder Watch) individual exclusions for files you know are already in your library.

tt2

This worked beautifully...thank you so much...