MP3 files being squirrely

July 23, 2006 2:11 PM

Why am I finding lots of duplicate songs and "unknown folder" files in my hard drive? Meh...

I decided to clean up my music files. I have an iPod. I found many duplicate MP3s, many empty file folders that I didn't create. I have a PC. Why is this happening and how do I stop it? It's annoying!

posted by miltoncat to Technology (6 answers total)

We'll be able to help you more if you tell us where you found the duplicates and the empty folders (and the names of the empty folders). I suspect it's an iTunes thing: iTunes creates new directories for content it downloads. But we really need more information from you to sort this out.
posted by orthogonality at 2:21 PM on July 23, 2006

Response by poster: I am finding the duplicates in the My Music file, under the iTunes Music folder. I was finding some of my MP3s in this folder and some were just in the My Music under no specific subgroup.
posted by miltoncat at 2:31 PM on July 23, 2006

My guess is that you have iTunes set to orgainze your music, and you have music that is lacking ID3 tags. iTunes sorts the music by Artists\Album\Track# Title.mp3 by.

This behaviour is not on by default, but happens when you turn on either of "Keep the itunes music folder organized" or "Copy files to the iTunes music folder" under Preferences -> Advanced -> General.
posted by tiamat at 7:36 PM on July 23, 2006

Hmmm . . . I'd suspect iTunes, too, but on my system (OS X) it deletes empty folders it created if the artist/album tracks have been deleted from within iTunes. For tracks without complete tags it puts them in 'unknown artist' or 'unknown album' folders as needed. I've never had a problem with it managing folders.

It does do this annoying thing where when removing a track from it's database it gives the option of 'keep files' or 'move to trash', with 'keep files' being the enter key default. I'm sure I've got a few unwanted files buried in my music folder because of this.

Are you using a recent version of iTunes?
posted by D.C. at 12:38 AM on July 24, 2006

It does do this annoying thing where when removing a track from it's database it gives the option of 'keep files' or 'move to trash', with 'keep files' being the enter key default.

You can hit the 'M' key to initiate the latter.
posted by evil holiday magic at 1:31 AM on July 24, 2006

When you're presented with that dialog, that is.
posted by evil holiday magic at 1:31 AM on July 24, 2006