How to clean up iTunes library

[Sara.S]

I am having a strange problem with my itunes now. I have songs in thousands of count in my itunes library. From which some of the tracks don't have artist names some tracks are just missing the album names while some tracks have the artist and song name crammed onto the Name field. Is this problem with any one of you ? My itunes library is just messed up. Is there any way to do a proper clean up of itunes library ?

[Raine]

You can find many tools to perform this action but the best i can suggest you is TuneUp. TuneUp is a great companion for iTunes.The ease of use can’t be beat. It's a way to fix your music when the tracks names get messed up or when you want to find cover art for your music. It allows you to simply drag and drop the songs that you want to fix from iTunes to TuneUp.You can simply highlight a batch and drag them to the TuneUp Clean tab to clean the names of all your songs. It will find all of the song, artist and album meta data and update iTunes automatically.The Concert tab gives you local concert information so you know exactly when a group you want to hear is coming to a venue near you.

Download TuneUp to Clean up iTunes

[MindSpace]

You can also cleanup the iTunes library easily using meta-iPod. It repairs and clean up your iTunes by reading through the metadata of your library.meta-iPod analyzes all data sources like recovering ratings and play counts from your iPod to tracking down files or folders gone missing.meta-iPod can tell you if your tracks are mismatched by comparing Metadata & iTunes Database labels which could indicate that your track has the wrong label. After finding mismatched tracks, meta-iPod lets you fix them quickly by selecting the appropriate labels.

[Pugsly]

You have a great way of cleaning up the music collection in Apple iTunes that is Teridon’s iTunes Scripts. is a collection of small scripts available as both PERL and EXE applications covering a wide range of iTunes-related tasks.With the help of this script you can create playlists of all your one-off single tracks, bulk add M3U playlists, embed iTunes album art right into the ID3 data of the songs, remove duplicates, and import your song ratings from MediaMonkey.Teridon's iTune Scripts are free, open-source, and is available for Windows only.

[O'Brian]

If you are a heavy Apple iTunes user your iTunes music library might contain music that is not longer on the computer system or duplicate music. To make a cleanup of your library becomes necessary after a period of time.For more info on iTunes library refer to this : How to make itunes rescan library?

[rajanmacha]

I am not very trusting on third-party applications. Isn't there a straight forward way to get rid of my iTunes duplicates and locate my missing songs directly from within iTunes. I also have some missing album artwork, which is not as crucial as getting fixed the first two issues.

Thanks for your answers.

[castrogiovanni]

As you have both missing album artwork and duplicate tracks, I would recommend to take the third-party-application path. Here is an article which compares various iTunes library tools which might be of interest to you

Well, otherwise, if you want to stick to iTunes, you would have to perform these tasks manually. The easiest way is in iTunes to go to Edit > Display Duplicates.

However, beware this will display both your duplicates and your original track listing in one place - so you might find it hard to recognize which is which, especially if you have lots of duplicates.

[rajanmacha]

As you have both missing album artwork and duplicate tracks, I would recommend to take the third-party-application path. Here is an article which compares various iTunes library tools which might be of interest to you

Well, otherwise, if you want to stick to iTunes, you would have to perform these tasks manually. The easiest way is in iTunes to go to Edit > Display Duplicates.

However, beware this will display both your duplicates and your original track listing in one place - so you might find it hard to recognize which is which, especially if you have lots of duplicates.

Dude thank you. I do not find the Display Duplicates function in iTunes to be a very effective solution to the problem, exactly because it does not really say which track is duplicate. iTunes also does a mediocre task of automatically finding missing Album artwork. Maybe I could use your advise. Could you please PM me a link to that article?

thanks a million.

[SpearMan]

You just have to open itunes and sort albums by title and it will show you duplicates by scrolling down through. After finding any duplicates open the actual folder the album is stored in and copy the files to a folder by creating it on desktop or anywhere you want. After copying just delete the 2 albums in itunes and go through the songs properties by right cliking on them and it will show items in the comment that are different so just delete all comments and track numbers. After doing this you can add a file to Library in itunes by copying it from the desktop folder and also copying the files, and it will get you your cover album back.