How to clean up a very corrupt Music library
I have been using iTunes since it first came out, and have been slowly ripping my massive CD collection to it ever since. Over that time, I have transferred my library to multiple computers, multiple external drive volumes, and most recently to a NAS volume that I just set up for myself. Here are the numerous complications to this problem:
- I was instructed by Apple Support long ago to change my Apple ID, which I did. The result of that was that a lot of my music did not seem to transfer over to the new ID, making authorization a big problem. I _appear_ to have that sorted out now.
- I joined Apple Music with a subscription, which did a VVERY PPOR job of transferring my music to Apple, since a lot of titles are obscure and not found on resources such as CDDB, hence ripping these CD's involved manual entry of data. A lot of music in my Library is grayed out and completely unplayable now.
- I now have THOUSANDS of duplicate songs showing up when I Show Duplicates in my library. There is no seeming rhyme or reason as to how the duplicates appear. For example, if I isolate a single pair of duplicates, the first one may not have a "Remove download" item in its context menu while the other one does. Some are showing up in playlists I created long ago, and some do not.
I need a LOT of help here, if you can't tell. I don't see any kind of visual indicator to easily tell which are the proper duplicates to delete and which are not - and before deleting, ensuring that the songs are added/included in the proper playlists.
I'm attaching a screenshot of just the beginning of the **** I'm in, noting the item count at the bottom.
Does anyone have any NON-DESTRUCTIVE advice for me? I have a full snapshot to restore from, should anything I try go wrong, but that snapshot brings me to the point at which this thread was opened.
It's time for some real genius power. :)
Mac mini, macOS 12.0
