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Music Management

post #1 of 12
3/1/08 at 3:03pm
Thread Starter 
Currently I have music on 4 different computers on my home network. My old desk top, my daughters computer, my sons computer, and my new laptop. I also have many of them backed up on an external hard drive. This collection has accumulated over about 10 years. Is there software that can organize these into one location? I tunes shows that I have most songs 2,3 & 4 times. I would like to weed out the duplicates while ensuring that I do not loose anything.
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post #2 of 12
3/5/08 at 6:35pm

Re: Music Management

I'm with you on this. I've done only a little research; I believe there is a way to have an iTunes 'master' file, but I don't know how to do it or with what success it could be done.

Also, I'm pretty sure there is software which can scan a collection for duplicates.

My problem is that about 70% of my music is WMA, 25% is mp4 and 5% is Mp3... I've thought avout consolidating my WMA to itunes, but I wonder if I do that will it convert the files to another format or will it duplicate them?

Besides, I kinda like the way windows organizes my CD collection more than I care for itunes.
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post #3 of 12
3/6/08 at 4:16am
Thread Starter 

Re: Music Management

Here is what I did. I backed up all the music on my computer including the itunes library. Then deleted the whole play list to get a clean start. I imported the music from all the different locations on my network to create one big list. It has many songs 2,3 & 4 times. I ran "show duplicates" and deleted the unnecessary songs choosing the largest file or highest baud rate to keep. Finally I had it all together, right? wrong!!

When I plugged in the ipod, a message came up stating that it could not sync because the play list had changed. I clicked "OK" and it erased the whole ipod. NO WHERE did mention anything saying this would happen. I figure, no problem because it is all backed up, right? wrong!!

When I went to make a new playlist from my library, many songs could not be found, even though itunes just imported them the day before!! I had even listened to them. So I restored all the deleted songs out of the recycle bin to make the play list. It still can't find about 10% of the songs. Even my purchased itune songs were missing. I finally found most of them. They were in the library, but had lost their "tag" information. they are just called "track 1" etc...

Being as I can not stay on this project for a long time at once, my ipod is seriously lacking most of the songs I want on it. I think they are still backed up on the network, but I don't have time to look for them one at a time. Itunes makes it very difficult to manage the music with out using itunes. It piratically gives each artist a folder, then each album a folder, then each song a folder. Instead of 3,000 songs in one place, they are in 2,500 separate folders. ARGHH...

I am not happy.

Edit: Yes it does convert the WMV files, but this is not an issue with me because 90% of my files are mp3/mp4
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post #4 of 12
3/6/08 at 5:02am

Re: Music Management

yeah, I've had lots of weirdness with iTunes also. It seems to happen after 'uupgrades' where song randomly get 'lost' and iTunes has to be redirected to the files. Some time ago a bunch of my songs got duplicate or even triplicate entries. Sometimes one of them is a bad tag - sometimes not.

All this weirdness with iTunes makes me EXTREMELY apprehensive about importing my entire library to itunes.

I seem to recall seeing where you can host music files for iTunes on a server file, but I don't know the specifics. I wonder what would happen if you were to re-import that music to iTunes? Trouble is - you'd have to redo all of your playlists.... I often have difficulty understanding the popularity of iTunes.

I wonder if this is unique to windows or if apple users have this problem also.
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post #5 of 12
3/7/08 at 1:44pm
Thread Starter 

Re: Music Management

I played hookey from work today and was able to work on my music library. I copied and pasted all my music from all the computers on to an external hard drive. I plugged the hard drive into my laptop because it is the newest computer I have. Then created a new folder "all music". I used the Vista search feature with *.*mp3. It came up with over 5,000 results, many are the same copies. I did the select all, cut and then paste into the new folder. It took about an hour but, much to my surprise, Vista did not choke on this large task. It sorted through all the songs and did not copy the same file twice. I did the same with m4p and WMA files and ended up with about 2,700 songs. (I found something nice to say about Vista. I bet XP would have locked up)
Then I cleared out itunes and imported my new folder. I asked it to show duplicates and deleted the ones I didn't want. As I went through them one at a time adding to my playlists, I then weeded out the ringtones etc. leaving 2,177 tracks. To the best I can tell, I am not missing anything. I am now syncing the ipod. Things are good again!
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post #6 of 12
3/8/08 at 6:13am

Re: Music Management

After my (now) wife & I moved in together, I realized I would need to eventually consolidate our music libraries. It took me about month of working on it randomly to set up all the folders the way I wanted, but it was well worth it. The main problem was her files were marked as "01 - Track Title" where mine were "01-Track Title", so it was difficult to find the duplicates. In the end, I was able to delete appx 4gb worth of data during the cleansing. I also used Mp3tag to ensure the files had the same style of tagging.


Quote:
Originally Posted by drobbins
Then created a new folder "all music". I used the Vista search feature with *.*mp3. It came up with over 5,000 results, many are the same copies. I did the select all, cut and then paste into the new folder. It took about an hour but, much to my surprise, Vista did not choke on this large task. It sorted through all the songs and did not copy the same file twice. I did the same with m4p and WMA files and ended up with about 2,700 songs. (I found something nice to say about Vista. I bet XP would have locked up)
Then I cleared out itunes and imported my new folder. I asked it to show duplicates and deleted the ones I didn't want. As I went through them one at a time adding to my playlists, I then weeded out the ringtones etc. leaving 2,177 tracks. To the best I can tell, I am not missing anything. I am now syncing the ipod. Things are good again!

I'm confused regarding what you mean about Vista vs XP. Did Vista sort through and not copy the duplicate files as you moved the files over? If so, that's impressive. If you're just talking about a cut & paste, I don't understand your statement about XP.

I only have XP on our computers, and our music folder currently has 24k+ songs. I've moved it several times from internal to external hard drive, via ehternet, USB & firewire without issue. The thought that XP wouldn't be able to handle a simple cut & paste task would infuriate me.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric_L
I often have difficulty understanding the popularity of iTunes.

I wonder if this is unique to windows or if apple users have this problem also.

I don't get the fascination with iTunes either. We don't use it to play our music on our PC. If we didn't have an iPod, we wouldn't use it at all. I don't know what it is, but iTunes on on our laptop can't seem to handle wirelessly accessing an external hard drive connected to my PC. At least not at a respectable speed. It took days for it to update the library. WMP or Foobar on the same laptop don't have this problem, but since they can't update an iPod, it is annoying. To update an iPod, I have to connect the external hard drive directly to the laptop.
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post #7 of 12
3/8/08 at 11:04am
Thread Starter 

Re: Music Management

Quote:
I'm confused regarding what you mean about Vista vs XP. Did Vista sort through and not copy the duplicate files as you moved the files over? If so, that's impressive. If you're just talking about a cut & paste, I don't understand your statement about XP.
After I put all the songs into one folder, there were many copies of the same file 2, 3, & 4 times. Then when I did the copy of the 5,000 files and pasted them into the new folder, the message came up about the file already existing and do I want to replace it. I checked the "no to all" option. Vista took the list of 5,000 and brought it down to about 2,700 with out any further instruction from me. It took a little under a hour. Now the ones that it sorted out were duplicates of the exact same file. I have tried similar tasks with XP and with under 100 files and it has choked.
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post #8 of 12
3/16/08 at 9:24am

Re: Music Management

I discovered something in itunes which should be useful for you to eliminate those duplicates.

Rightclick on the bar over the top of your song library. A menu should appear. Select 'date added'.

Now, find the 'date added' column, sort by.

You should see a long list of songs added on one day. Double click ONE. See if it plays.

Now - you may want to empty your recycling/trash bin before doing this;

Delete the song. Select not to keep the file. Go to the other listing for that song and try to play it. If it does not play then WHOOPS! Go to your recycling bin and restore it. Best to do with a song you don't care much for.


If the original file played OK - go ahead and start deleting away

If the original song did NOT play OK - after you restore the file, you can still delete away, just chooses to KEEP the file.

I used a program called fixtunes. It is really buggy software but it did do a good job of finding duplicates, particularly ones with the exclamation points. Once I sorted them by date added it was really simple to delete them 30 songs at a time...
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post #9 of 12
3/16/08 at 2:11pm

Re: Music Management

I have an abiding mistrust and dislike, bordering on maniacal, over iTunes - the only reason it exists in my computing network is for my daughter's IPOD (I use a Sansa).
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post #10 of 12
3/16/08 at 5:14pm
Thread Starter 

Re: Music Management

Quote:
Originally Posted by ChristopherG
I have an abiding mistrust and dislike, bordering on maniacal, over iTunes - the only reason it exists in my computing network is for my daughter's IPOD (I use a Sansa).
I used to feel almost the same way but 4 ipods using 3 computers for a few years now has eroded much of that away. I like or dislike it. It just works for the ipods.
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post #11 of 12
3/18/08 at 5:07pm

Re: Music Management

Quote:
Originally Posted by drobbins
Currently I have music on 4 different computers on my home network. My old desk top, my daughters computer, my sons computer, and my new laptop. I also have many of them backed up on an external hard drive. This collection has accumulated over about 10 years. Is there software that can organize these into one location? I tunes shows that I have most songs 2,3 & 4 times. I would like to weed out the duplicates while ensuring that I do not loose anything.

I found a program which you may find helpful;
SyncToy: a free powertoy download for file synchronization

I'm going to experiment with it. It should be a nice way to backup my music folder. I saw an article where one guy had been able to use it to make sure that any update on one PC with itunes would automatically show up on the other pcs... I'll have to see i I can dig it up again.

edit; found it: Hack Attack: Share your iTunes music library over your home network
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post #12 of 12
3/19/08 at 11:03am
Thread Starter 

Re: Music Management

I had used that Synctoy in the past when I had all the music on one computer. I then backed it up on another and it worked quite well. The issue now is 3 of us are buying music on 3 different computers. I guess I should have them all point to one location on the network as the article suggested and then back up that one folder. That should prevent me from having this issue again in the future.
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