Help me clean my iTunes

[RPSharman]

Who has purchased and used a program to clean up and remove duplicates from iTunes? I have found TuneUp and RinseMyMusic. Looking to consolidate all of my music. Please help.

[Jim Gilchrist]

I gave TuneUp a try and was underwhelmed. I removed it after TuneUp decided it wanted to download and install an update. TuneUp couldn't connect to the update server and repeatedly froze iTunes. It's slow and requires a lot of user input to do what it claims it does when it is able to load.

There is a free trial and it couldn't hurt to give it a whirl. Maybe you'll have better luck with the product than I did.

Best regards,

Jim

[Marc Wielage]

Tune Up didn't work for me -- I found nothing worked better than my own eyes and fingers.

The best way to eliminate dupes is what Scott says above:

1) File -> Display Duplicates

2) sort the tracks by Date Added

3) manually delete the ones with the later dates.

Be sure to back up your iTunes Library beforehand, just in case things go Horribly Wrong. I have several iTunes Libraries that go way over 50,000 tracks, and keeping them all juggled and organized is a lot of work, especially on multiple drives and multiple iPods.

One of my tricks to taking care of this many tracks is: I organize everything manually, and I cheat and use third-party programs for tagging and converting. Sadly, most of those only work under Windows. I've used a couple of dozen tagging programs, and nothing I've found is better than Softpointer's Tag & Rename, and the hands-down best CD ripping program I've found is dBPowerAmp. Each is far more powerful and flexible than what you get within iTunes. I use iTunes only for creating playlists and adding files to iPods.

--Marc W.

[chris_bollard]

Have to agree with most of the above. After reinstalling on my work laptop AND manually sorting thru the mess iTunes had made of my 140 gb of music I now keep well clear of iTunes.

As I'm on Win7 I use foobar2000 as my player of choice and MP3tag as my metatag editor. Both are fantastic and only do what you ask of them, and have an undo option. For CD ripping and codec conversion dbpoweramp is the king.

Now I only use iTunes to backup my iPhone and I'm so much happier for that.

[Angelo Waldron]

Can't stand iTunes.

[pindrop]

Can't stand iTunes.

I hate ITunes as well it's truly horrible - an Apple disgrace (along with Finder).

iTunes is mostly about Apple keeping control of it's revenue stream unlike the majority of other easy to use and flexible Apple software.

[Marc Wielage]

iTunes works fine for me, but I cheat. I use it only on Mac, and I use several third-party programs to tag files and organize the collection. iTunes by itself can be a nightmare -- and I've been using it for 8 years.

But for just creating playlists, for playing back music, and loading music onto iPods, it's fine. It can be made to work under Windows, but QuickTime has always been buggy on non-Mac platforms.

--Marc W.

[JackHenry]

I use it only on Mac, and I use several third-party programs to tag files and organize the collection.

--Marc W.

Marc

Can you name some?

[Marc Wielage]

Yeah, I use Tag & Rename to embed all the metadata tags and image files:

http://www.softpointer.com

and then I use dBPowerAmp to do a bit-for-bit "AccurateRip" from CDs:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

The chief advantage of dBP is that it grabs CD track & artist metadata from any of 4 different sources, which gives you a much better chance of getting the right spelling and punctuation and all that stuff. And I've found AccurateRip to be a near-flawless way of getting clean tracks off CD, far better than iTunes. I can also specify the names and locations of folders and files, which gives me better control over organizing large groups of music files. dBP also converts damned near anything to anything, including weird formats like Ogg Vorbis, plus it allows you to process files when necessary, like taking stereo-ripped WAV files and converting them to mono (either combining tracks or using just 1 channel).

Once I get the files exactly as I need them, then I bring them over to the Mac and iTunes, and prepare playlists for download to various iPods. It's more complicated than it works. I have a cheap PC on another desk and just use that while I'm doing "real work" on the Mac. Works fine for me.

Chris Connaker's excellent Computer Audiophile website has a pretty good rundown on "CD Ripping Methodology" that parallels what took me several years of painful trial and error to discover:

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/Computer-Audiophile-CD-Ripping-Strategy-and-Methodology

--Marc W.

[Thomas Popp]

I use TuneUp for naming all my tracks. I also use it to delete the majority of my duplicates. It misses A LOT of them.

There is another program called RINSE. It is HORRIBLE and takes forever in naming and fixing tracks, but works A LOT better at deleting duplicates!

[benr]

I use Winamp on a PC to rip all my CDs and then organize my music in regular old folders. I also create playlists within folders as well. That way is doesnt matter what application I use to play the music as the organization is always recognized. Then I just use iTunes to play or transfer to my iDevices.