Well, it had to happen. ITunes has finally mangled my music library beyond all recognition. The spectacularly arrogant Apple engineers have created a real monster with this application, even though I had been enjoying it for the last few generations, since it stopped being utter crap in the later oughts.
But no … they could not leave well enough alone and they started changing the structure of my library without ever notifying me. So now I have this Frankensteinian hodge podge of folders that are incomplete, duplicated, and just generally FUBAR.
Thanks Apple … never again.
I had set the library to D:\iTinesLibrary … a rather nice setup and trivial for them to use. I never cared where the metadata (library XML files, album art, etc) went, they were welcome to manage that. But I never gave it permission to restructure.
Yet here we are …
So what you see there is from BeyondCompare, a truly remarkable tool for comparing pretty much anything. Highly recommended.
What iTunes did at some point was to create a subfolder structure and start using that to manage my music. And things might have been fine had it respected the “manage my music” check box and asked me if it could move all my music to the new location. But it simply moved some of it and started using both locations. What a fricken mess!
You can see that a lot of the music is in the new location on the right, and some is in both locations. The red icons show you where there is duplicated music that is in fact in both locations but with different sizes. This duplication shows up in my new favourite streaming server, Plex. ITunes seems to weed some, but not all of the duplication out.
So in the end my library must again be reset. I will be removing the music from the itunes folders and will be consolidating it into a separate location. ITunes will be allowed to only manage its own data and not the actual music. It’s incompetence (and that of Apple’s software team) have broken my back after a decade of stuttering steps forward and then backward. And I have had it.
Plex is a far better streaming service and application set anyway … you really owe it to yourself to look into it … it runs on everything and the server is actually intelligent.
