livemeyer wrote:
FYI I don't actually have any .jpg album art in these folders, it's all .itc2 files.
That is as expected.
I got to this because I had found one song by an artist in one folder and another in another folder (one folder had "The" at the beginning of the band name and one did not). When I combined the folders by matching the folder names, Windows File Explorer asked me if I wanted to rename a .jpg with a (2) at the end because it was a duplicate.
That is why I mentioned .jpg files in your media folders.
I keep my music folder and file names highly organized, I make extra effort to make certain files are named in a certain way and have all the right metadata so they show up correctly in iTunes. Because of this I quite often tell iTunes to search out files in my Music folder, which may explain why it has numerous .itc2 files, considering every time I tell it to do this it starts the process of finding artwork immediately after.
If you don't clear out broken entries after moving things around that might be why you have more .itc2 files than would be expected in the active folders (but I'm not convinced that you do/did, at least as far as the active set of cache files is concerned). I have 20,853 .itc2 files for my library of 73,683 items over all types of media, 65,698 of which are music (6,154 albums, 2,560 artists).
Generally managing metadata in iTunes and letting it manage where the files actually live cuts down the amount of energy spent on managing the library. That said I have developed my own script for consolidating & organizing my media (and any folder art) which uses different character replacements and longer file & folder names than iTunes will generate. (A variant of ConsolidateByMoving.) I don't advocate this level of obsessiveness for anyone else, particularly if you only use one form of software or another to actually play content since these generally make use of the metadata. The physical layout really doesn't matter.
tt2