iTunes 7 is woefully lacking in library management tools.
For some obscure reason after the regular Windows Update procedure (Windows rebooted to install a security patch), iTunes launches and starts indexing my entire storage capacity. Unfortunately (at least in this case) my third HDD which I use for data redundancy (since my new PC is a gaming rig with RAID 0, which means no redundancy at all, so the second drive is a non-redundant/non-RAID drive that I use solely for data… I use a third drive to mirror the second…)
Anyway, the point is that my third drive had a duplicate of my entire music library and iTunes indexed them all and added them. So, after many duplicates (triplicates and more), I ended up having over 9000 songs in there when I normally have only about 2000… It must have done this more than once while I wasn’t watching.
And wouldn’t you know it, iTunes has no tools to help you easily find and remove duplicates. The View Duplicates feature has no intelligence, which makes it virtually useless for pruning out 6000+ duplicate records.
On the positive side, it did finally import all of the music on my data drive that I’ve been planning to eventually import… now I just have to figure out which segments are damaged and should be deleted and rate the rest.
If only I could remember this trick I found once that involved creating a couple of playlists and then using a smart playlist to help you quickly identify all music that was orphaned… (that is, without a file).. I just turned off the 3rd HDD and used an iTunes plugin to find all of the missing files and then remove them from the database. That saved me weeks of click… click… click… which is how Apple would have me do it…
Many months later…
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