HELP!!! scattered, duplicated music library

[gene789]

HI, I recently upgraded my comp to ssd, everything went well except Itunes.
I am so ready to make a switch to a new player. After collecting since the days of Napster, I've ended up with a decentralized library, with lots of duplicate files. In researching, everyone recommends first gather all your music together in one folder, then recommend their favorite media manager(mediamonkey, foobar etc.) But leave out the part of how to gather it all together. I think I've ended up two copies of music folders, and some music may have been saved in download or documents folders, or their own folder over the years. And maybe in mp3, ACC or other formats.
I wish I had a deeper understanding of the file system, but thought it was less important with Windows 7 new Library system. Is there a tool that can gather all my music back together where a player can find them? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[CrowdAds]

[McDougal]

Hmmmm fixing up a music library can be a huge task. The easiest way to consolidate all your files that I know of is to use iTunes. Make sure you have all of your tunes imported into iTunes, and then go to File<Library<Organize Library and check Consolidate files to begin the process.

iTunes will then begin creating copies of all your files into the iTunes folder in the filename format of "track# Title".

Once they're all consolidated, then you will have to go through the iTunes folder and delete any duplicates. Then you can clean up your tags with Mp3tag.

Good luck, let me know if you need any help! And welcome to ABi.

[skip252]

You're not supposed to look for the files. That's the job of the media library software you decide to use. MediaMonkey did all the searching for me when I was in the same position you are a few years ago. I pointed it at all the drives where I was storing music and had it scan them all.

After MM found all the files I started by opening the Files To Edit menu and worked all the files it said needed editing. The Auto Tag... functions helped a lot. The Auto Tag from Web and Auto Tag from Filename functions were a big help. Once I figured out that I could use tags to move files I invested in a external drive and started moving files to that. Once I got done with that I discovered that I had left behind hundreds of duplicates that had accumulated across the years.

It was a lot of work that took weeks to complete but it was well worth the effort in my opinion. I can find any song I own now in a few seconds. I don't think, I know that I'm not storing duplicates anywhere unless I want to.

I use foobar2000 almost exclusively now to manage my music so I'm not as up on MM as I was. Don't let that stop you from asking questions here. I help a couple of people in real life with it so I keep up with it at least some. There's a couple of other members that are real power users. They'll no doubt be able to help if there's something that stumps the both of us.

[McDougal]

Originally Posted by skip252

You're not supposed to look for the files. That's the job of the media library software you decide to use. MediaMonkey did all the searching for me when I was in the same position you are a few years ago. I pointed it at all the drives where I was storing music and had it scan them all.

After MM found all the files I started by opening the Files To Edit menu and worked all the files it said needed editing. The Auto Tag... functions helped a lot. The Auto Tag from Web and Auto Tag from Filename functions were a big help. Once I figured out that I could use tags to move files I invested in a external drive and started moving files to that. Once I got done with that I discovered that I had left behind hundreds of duplicates that had accumulated across the years.

It was a lot of work that took weeks to complete but it was well worth the effort in my opinion. I can find any song I own now in a few seconds. I don't think, I know that I'm not storing duplicates anywhere unless I want to.

I use foobar2000 almost exclusively now to manage my music so I'm not as up on MM as I was. Don't let that stop you from asking questions here. I help a couple of people in real life with it so I keep up with it at least some. There's a couple of other members that are real power users. They'll no doubt be able to help if there's something that stumps the both of us.

+1. After I finished organizing my collection with MusicBee, I know instantly where everything is. I used MusicBee to organize my collection as "Artist/Album/Track# - Title" and it's so much easier to manage .