Consolidate Library - music disappeared? size and number of files discrepancy

Forgot to mention:

iTunes version: 10.6.3

And I use iTunes only for music files, AAC and MP3 mostly, a few AIFF's.

No podcasts, movies, or any other media in it.

Part of the mystery I just found out myself, by scrolling through the music folder on my backup clone, where the "before consolidation" clone resides:

This year I've been cleaning up my library. Deleting a lot of music that I almost never listen to, to save some space. Have it backed up elsewhere anyway, don't need it on my laptop.

When you delete something within the library, a pop-up says "Are you sure blablah...", then you click "Delete Song(s)", then another pop-up says "Do you want to move the selected songs to the trash, or keep them in the iTunes Media folder?". Then I always clicked "Move To Trash".

For some mysterious reason, it didn't move the files that where in the "iTunes Music" folder to the trash. They disappeared from my Library, but were still there in the "iTunes Music" folder. That's where the 21GB difference goes I suspect, it's about the amount of music I removed from my laptop probably.

The more recent files that were in the new "iTunes Media" folder were probably trashed I guess.

So my theory is that this is a bug in iTunes, that probably started at the moment the default location was changed to "iTunes Media". Can't believe I'm the only one experiencing this?

Anyone else on the forum with these two folders (iTunes Music and iTunes Media) who can confirm that if you remove something (from the old Music Folder), the actual file is not trashed?

But still some questions remain:

131 items disappeared after consolidation. How to figure out which ones?

Why a difference of 11,4 GB between the Finder Folder Info and the iTunes window info?

166,16GB vs 154,74GB

and 131 songs does not correspond to a size of 11,4GB...

turingtest2 wrote:

iTunes only offers to send files to the trash if they are in the designated media folder.

Apparently not, I've always been offered the option to send the files I wanted to delete to the trash. Even when these files were located in the original Music folder, after the point where the Media folder was introduced. Until now I never realised iTunes doesn't want to trash stuff that is not located in its default Media folder. It acts as if it allows you to trash it, but it doesn't. No message at all that the operation couldn't be completed. This seems like a bug to me.

I'm quite sure that there must be other users out there with the same problem, but are unaware of it.

Please report here if anyone experiences the same.

Now can somebody please check : difference between total media size at the bottom of the iTunes window when you click on Library - and the size value of the Media folder you find in the Finder window through Get Info.

I still have that above mentioned 11GB size difference. (again, I have only music files)

Hypothesis:

Could it be that iTunes calculates a total size merely based upon track lenght and bitrate, without taking attached artwork into account? Because most of my music files have the artwork embedded in the file. (Not in the special artwork folder.) I've got my reasons for that. This could explain the difference, just thinking out loud...

turingtest2 wrote:

If you have any logical dupes, that is two entries in the library connected to the same physical file, then iTunes would report larger values than Finder for the same content.

But the reverse is true: iTunes reports a LOWER value than the Finder. See above posts.

166,16GB (finder) vs 154,74GB (iTunes)

Thanks for trying to help anyway.

I'm a very organised person, my iTunes library doesn't contain many duplicates except for songs that appeared on an EP as well as on a full album. But those are different files, with the same song name, but different album name and other different meta data.

If found another thread about this here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2565775?start=0&tstart=0

Apparently the finder DOES calculate the size differently then iTunes !

I compared a bunch of individual files, first the size in iTunes, then right-click > show in finder.

Each time the Finder value is considerably higher than what iTunes reports.

Try it your self. (Didn't calculate a percentage yet.)

If that adds up for 16500 songs, the difference could be 11GB.

I'm gonna dig into that tomorrow, it's getting late, should get some sleep ;-)

Ok, promblem solved then, that must be it. Base 10 - Base 2 difference.

This change was introduced in Snow Leopard apparently, according to this article.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20111108130725594

Never noticed until now.

It was probably announced in a very small font somewhere at the bottom of a "what's new" document :-)

Interesting to know, now I can go on with my life, thanks for thinking along with me TT2, cheerz.

One last remark, it's not very consistent by Apple, to change this Base for the file size calculations in Finder only. If they decided to change it, they should have changed it through the whole OS, iTunes app included. For many years now, consistency through all apps is very important to them, so why did they fail here??