How do you remove deleted files (!) from the iTunes Library
March 12th, 2010 by steveWhen you let iTunes completely restructure your music folders, you end up with a lot of duplicate files. If you have the harddrive space, that’s fine. If you don’t, then you’re going to want to delete some of those duplicates.
The question is, how do you do that without ending up with a lot of files with exclamation marks (!) beside them? They are not sorted, so you have to select them individually and delete them.
So it goes in the world of iTunes, the iPod, and the iPhone.
I found this solution worked for my iTunes library, but caused me to lose my playcounts and ratings.
- Choose File / Library / Export Library. This exports your iTunes library database as an xml file. Save it onto your desktop.
- Select all entries in your iTunes music library and press the Delete key. Don’t delete the files themselves if iTunes gives you the option to do so. You simply want to clear the database of all entries.
- Exit iTunes.
- Navigate to the iTunes folder inside your user folder and move the iTunes Music Library.xml and iTunes Library files to the Desktop. You may want them later, but I didn’t.
- Launch iTunes. The iTunes library will be empty.
- Choose Edit / Preferances / Advanced / Change / and navigate to your music library location. This will keep iTunes from moving your songs to the folder it wants them in.
- Choose File / Add Folder to Library / navigate to the location of your music files (as in step 6), selecting the folder that holds all your music folders /click Choose. This will take a while — a long while if your songs are sitting on a server like mine are — so relax.
- When that’s done, to restore your playlists, choose File /Import. Navigate to the Library.xml file you exported before and click Choose. Again, this will probably take some time.
There’s probably an easier way to do this. I found dozens of suggestions online. This is the one that worked for me. If you’ve suggestions, please comment.
As with everything, this information is provided without warranty, express or implied. Any loss that comes about as a result of this action is the responsibility of the end user and not ShieldsGroup. 🙂
