[peter_cph]

I read somewhere that Woz criticizes Apple (and Microsoft) for making lousy software. And that he suggests that Apple goes back to the Lisa days, when software was created with the user in mind - as a tool for productivity.

Having worked with iTunes I can only agree.

It started out fine ... I thought iTunes was nifty .,.. I came from SoundJam on OS 9 which I was totally happy with ... but in OSX I moived to iTunes as it seemed the natural choice.

Then my problems started. I impoted a compilation (in this instance a triple CD with the Rolling Stones singles from the London Years). Some of the songs was already there ... imported from the original CD's. Now I had them twice.

I did a search for .. let's say ... Little Red Rooster. Now find that the hierachy is NOT iTunes Music -> Rolling Stones -> Album Name -> File.mp3 ... which would have made sense to me.

It's iTunes Music -> Rolling Stones -> Little Red Rooster -> Album Name -> file.mp3

So ... if i make a search for "London Years", I have that 3cd compilation sctetred over 30+ folders ...

Why the F***** beeep can't I just import an album, make it a playlist (automatically please) and have a logic path to the songs like iTunes Music -> Artist -> Album

Why oh why? How difficult can that be?

When I go to my local music pusher, i don't buy track 3, 4 and 7 of the new U2, track 5 from Chemical Bros "Come With Us" and a few takes from Robert Johnson and the soundtrack to Tomb Raider.

I buy albums. I respect the artists to put together an album, I respect their right to decide in which order THEY think the music should be experienced.

I would like to get the album into iTunes without interference by Apple, some "get everything in alphabetic order system" or other interference.

If I decide to make a playlist for a party - or to take with me in the car - I'll do it myself, thanks!

Am I the only one?

Back to the duplicates .... I know Apples software people are probably good, smart guys. I must have been soing something wrong ... so I copy all my music to an external FW-drive ... seletct and deletes everything in iTunes and import from the new folder on the external drive.

Result? I have everything 3 times now. 'Case I didn't trash anything ... I just removed thye files from iTunes playlist ... and now everything is bak again ... plus the new copy!

So I turn to the internet for help ... ask in usergropups and get all kinds of answers. Some more helpful than others. Some more hilarious than others.

Like .... there's a function in iTunes to show duplicate files.

Cool answer ... that function will tell me that all songs named Fame by David Bowie are identical ... not very useful.

Then of course I can Command-R each duplicate and find that iTunes have made fame.mp3, fame 1.mp3, fame 2.mp3 etc. And the same in other folders from live shows and so on ...

Admitted ... it will only take a couple of years to clean up 120 Gigs this way.

I have also downloaded "Trash Duplicates", which works on 2 selected files ... at a time.

And the CorraliTunesaDupes script whiche counts the files and takes forever (11 days until a power failure forced me to start over) ... and I don't even know what to do once the script has finished building the Dupe playlist .... Command-R again?

Then there's iTunes Dupes Barrier ... does it block import of identical duplicates? Not to my knowledge. OK, it's only a couple of dollars every time in shareware fees ... but it get's annoying.

Back under OS 9 i had a nifty utility called Disk Keeper by Parrot Software ... it was a gem ... not only for music files, but also for all other kinds of files. Cool, simple interface ... showed duplicates side by side in a split window ... showing file size, name, extension, location and giving the opportunity to delete either this or that file ... so cool!

So my questions are, my dear learned friends ...

Why don't iTunes pop up a window saying "We already have this file listed in the xxx folder. Do you want to import it again? Yes/No)

Is there a way ... a script, a program, a plug-in, an extension, anything ... that will let me clean up my iTunes music library? Or let me start over with a clean iTunes library and import everything again ... with the exception of duplicate files.

Now, I am being difficult ... the above-mentioned (a script, a program, a plug-in, an extension, anything) should be tuneable ... so if No Milk Today is on the original Hermans Hermits album and also on the 60's Classics album, I would like to have it imported twice .. so iTunes also works as a full backup of my music collection. So to speak ... import full albums and make them play with iTunes?

Have I approached this totally wrong from day one? And how do I get all this sorted out?

Almost ready to give up .... completely.

Thanks for your patience.

Peter

[TETENAL]

First, iTunes is mainly intended to be used for accessing your music. Therefore what the file structure on disk is is pretty irrelevant. If you need your music outside of iTunes (or iPhoto) for whatever reason you can drag directly out of the iTunes (resp. iPhoto folder).

Second, if you have a compilation you mark the songs as "Part of a compilation" and they are grouped as compilation and not by artist.

Third, whenever I reimported an already existing song (trying to rerip from CD for example) iTunes told me it was there already and asked whether I wanted to replace it. I didn't test border cases like deleting all files from the library but not trashing the files or something like that though.

Fourth, iTunes doesn't support song aliases which would be useful if you have songs in albums/singles/compilations multiple times. It would be a nice feature but for most users it doesn't happen too often to have songs multiple times and then having them twice on disk isn't that big of an issue.

[Thinine]

For the song replacement, the tags need to match exactly. I just reripped my CDs into lossless and iTunes didn't all of them were replacement. Apparently some tags in Gracenote were slightly different from the ones in CDDB when I originally ripped them. Or happened for a few albums though. The rest replaced just fine.