[Cube13]

Hi All,

Have a really odd question. I'm still newbie to the Mac world (but learning everyday! )

I created a music folder on my desktop that has all of my MP3's in it. I imported the files into iTunes and let it do its thing. Everything works great!

Now while looking around my drive contents I noticed an iTunes folder called iTunes Music and it had all of my music sorted out and everything , it also had my mp3's in there

Now my question, the music folder on the desktop obviously is taking drive space up but is the iTunes folder storing my songs in a different place taking space as well so that my mp3's are in two places taking up hard drive real estate?

Can I erase the original music folder and just have the iTunes one?

What is the best way to put songs in the list without this happening again?

Any info is greatly appreciated as I am running out of drive space

[Developer]

Yes, by default iTunes copies imported music into its own folder. Which takes additional space in your hard disk. You can delete the original if you wish.

If you look into iTunes->Preferences->Advanced you can see that you can turn off this behavior. Then iTunes only stores a reference to the music file. You can also change the place of the iTunes music folder. And there's the option to organize this folder which means iTunes will rename the files and automatically sort them into subfolders of band and album.

I would suggest to let iTunes copy the music into the music folder at the default location and let it organize this folder (what you did basically), unless you have some special needs.

[wataru]

^What he said.

And to clarify: If you let iTunes sort your music and all, then when you get new music, just drop the file on your iTunes library, and then delete that file (because iTunes has then made a copy of it and organized it in your Music folder). Of course this doesn't apply to CD rips (if you do them in iTunes), because in that case the files go straight into iTunes. I hope my wording is clear.

This may sound like a pain in the ass, but it's worth it to get that automatic organization.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally posted by wataru:
^What he said.

This may sound like a pain in the ass, but it's worth it to get that automatic organization.

It's great in that:

1) If you are a lazy person, you don't have to organize as iTunes will do it.

2) If you are anal (like many MacNN people) you can do it "your way"

I'm happy this is a feature because some people spend HOURS organizing their music into folders and subfolders with specialized icons etc. For those people, the second option is the best as it lets them do what they want with their files and iTunes stays hands off. Also people that download MP3s from "various" sources usually have to deal with incorrect tags (like having 1000 songs in the unknown album and unknown song folders).

iTunes does it the most simplistic way... and Apple usually doesn't consider hard drive space an issue.