Extra Files In Media Folder

Hi there,

Running iTunes 12.7.4.80 for Windows

Backing up my library recently I noticed the library seems to be getting larger and larger, so I looked in the media folder and I noticed that many of the songs now have two or more files associated with them.

Example: a song called 'Chills & Fever' sits in the folder for the album on which it appears, which is a subfolder of the folder for the artist who sings it.

However, I find there are two files in that folder:

1-01 Chills & Fever.m4a

1-01 Chills & Fever@ab4caa66030a40c593054f05279c4e5b.m4a

The song only shows up once in iTunes, with the file info being the top one above. If I delete the second file, it seems to cause no problems with the song on iTunes.

I did a search for .m4a files within my media folder and subfolders, and hundreds/thousands appear with a long string of characters like the second one above.

Does anyone know why these are being created? And if there is a way to stop it? Finally, is there a quick and easy way to delete all such extraneous files?

Thanks for any advice.

null-OTHER, Windows 10, iTunes for Windows

Posted on May 27, 2018 5:05 AM

Posted on May 28, 2018 10:27 AM

I've prepared a script for you called Kill@Files. It will recursively process from an initial folder, removing all files of the form <normal filename>@<32 hex digits>.<ext>. Strictly it finds any filename with @ followed by exactly 36 characters including the extension, but that really shouldn't allow for any false positives in this context. As I said previously it would be best to backup first just in case. The script will delete matching files immediately rather than sending to the recycle bin, although I could try to add that as a modification if you wish, or I could archive the unwanted files elsewhere if you are worried there might be an unforseen impact. Test on say a single artist folder first to see how it behaves before running on your entire media folder. There is no visual feedback while it is running so you'll have to be patient. At the end you will be told how many folders where examined and how many files removed.

tt2

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Extra Files In Media Folder

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