Confused: Remove/Delete Music from Finder or iTunes?

Hello All,

Upon wanting to add a large amount of music to my library I got a warning sign that not everything will be imported because insufficient space. So I am venturing out to "clean up" older stuff I no longer listen to.

I went through my itunes music folder in finder and removed the files and put them in a folder on the desktop to rip to a dvd or my ext. HD. Then I would delete these files from my Mac HD.

Question is, where am I really supposed to remove music from? The iTunes application or finder? If I remove them from finder, why are they still in my iTunes library?

I apologize if this has been covered before...yet, again having trouble finding a solution with the search.

Thank you for any input you can lend.

S

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.7), iPod Classic 80GB

Posted on Apr 3, 2011 8:16 AM

20 replies

Chris CA

Level 10

82,513 points

May 9, 2011 6:27 PM in response to sicjoy

If you wish to burn songs to a DVD and keep them in Artist/Album folders...

Create a playlist with the songs you want.

Sort on Album (to put them into Album folders) or sort on Artist (to put them into Artist/Album folders) then burn a Data DVD.

This works for MP3 discs and I'm pretty sure it works for Data discs also (I cannot check it out at the moment but pretty sure I have tried it in the past).

Then you can delete them from iTunes.

It should ask if you want to delete from the iTunes library then ask if you want to delete them from the hard drive.

However, before you delete anything...

I went through my itunes music folder in finder and removed the files and put them in a folder on the desktop to rip to a dvd or my ext. HD. Then I would delete these files from my Mac HD.

You can leave them in iTunes, keep everything in iTunes on the external drive and delete from your internal drive.

This way everything is still there and not taking up room on the internal.

sicjoy Author

Level 1

7 points

May 10, 2011 5:46 AM in response to Chris CA

Chris,

Thanks so much for your input and recommendations. I will do the playlist ASAP.

You can leave them in iTunes, keep everything in iTunes on the external drive and delete from your internal drive.

This way everything is still there and not taking up room on the internal.

Is this "safe" to do? I mean, just keeping all my iTunes music on an ext HD and some of it on my internal HD? Would getting a new internal HD (larger) be the best option? Is that hard to install yourself?

I use an ext HD for Time Machine back-ups; would I need an additional ext HD just for iTunes? Would the only detriment to this be having to connect the ext HD each time I wanted to access all my music?

Thanks again for your time.

Rob X

Level 1

11 points

Apr 3, 2011 12:00 PM in response to sicjoy

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=removedeadsuper

Rob X

Level 1

11 points

Apr 3, 2011 3:31 PM in response to sicjoy

Yeah, I would.

sicjoy Author

Level 1

7 points

Apr 3, 2011 4:20 PM in response to Rob X

The "!" didn't come up and the song played. Weird?

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Confused: Remove/Delete Music from Finder or iTunes?