80s power ballads, begone.

June 1, 2008 1:04 PM

dumb question: when i delete a song from itunes, where does it go?

i don't understand the delete mechanism in itunes. when i delete a photo in iphoto, for instance, it ends up in the iphoto trash, which i can then empty (as a seperate action from deleting my laptop's trash).

when i highlight a song in itunes and press delete, it vanishes from my itunes playlist. but it doesn't end up in my laptop's trash bin, and i don't see an itunes-specific trash. so where are those songs going, and how do i get rid of them for real, to free up some hard drive space?

oh, and i'm running osx 10.4.11.
thanks.

posted by twistofrhyme to computers & internet (7 comments total)

When I press delete it asks me if I just want to remove the song from my library or if I want to actually delete the file. Does it not do that for you?
posted by mpls2 at 1:14 PM on June 1, 2008

If you delete it from a playlist, it won't play in that run through, but will still be in your library.

When I delete a track from the library, I get an "Are you sure dialogue" and confirming gets a "Do you want to move the selected song to the Trash, or keep it in the iTunes music folder" dialogue.
posted by gregjones at 1:15 PM on June 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

hmm... i don't get that dialogue. i'm trying to delete from the library, not from a playlist (good call on that, though- i made that mistake a few times too!)
posted by twistofrhyme at 1:19 PM on June 1, 2008

If I remember correctly, it used to be that if you didn't let iTunes organize things its own way -- that is, if you kept your music in folders of your own design and not in the automatically-organized iTunes Music folder -- deleting a song would just remove it from the database and leave the file where it was. I'm not sure if it still works that way.
posted by danb at 1:31 PM on June 1, 2008

If the song is in your iTunes music folder, and you have "Keep iTunes folder organized", then you will get the second message "would you like this file to be moved to the trash?" If you say yes, then the file(s) will be moved to the trash.

Any other result means that, while the song was deleted from the iTunes song list, the actual music file was not moved from its location.
posted by Aquaman at 1:53 PM on June 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

This is an iTunes interface thing that bugs me no end - I wish they'd just add a preference option of "always move deleted files to finder trash" or somesuch. It's a pain to have to hunt the files you've just deleted and forgot the name of in the home/music/itunes directory.

But as previously mentioned, pressing 8984; del on a song in your library section will bring up the dialog asking if you want to move it to the trash or keep it in its' current location and only delete it from the iTunes db. The same keys in a playlist only remove the file from the playlist, and pressing only del in the library will just remove it from iTunes db and leave it in the folder, incrementally hogging the precious space with its' crappyness.
posted by monocultured at 4:01 AM on June 2, 2008

argh.

8984; translates to the apple key (⌘) if I hadn't bothered to use the decimal code.
posted by monocultured at 4:09 AM on June 2, 2008