meta-iPod: the iTunes Cleaner

I finally took the step of giving the kids their own iTunes install in each of their accounts. As usual, with Apple's inflexible software, when doing things that are slightly different that what the designers thought you "should" do, the process was a bit painful.

I wanted to share my library with the kids, so we all had access to the same music. I first moved all my music to the "Public" folder in Vista, but then had second thoughts. If one of the kids mistakenly deleted a file, it would be gone from my library and I wouldn't know it until I tried to play it or sync it to my iPod. I then moved the files back to my own iTunes Music folder and enabled sharing. In this process, iTunes temporarily lost its mind and started to reorganize some files into folders based on their tags. This resulted in about 150 duplicate files. Arghhhh...

Since iTunes library management (including its pitiful, unconfigurable duplicate finder) utterly stinks, I had to find a better (automated) way to remove the duplicates in a way that made sense.

This is where meta-iPod came in. It did the job wonderfully and was a breeze to use.

meta-iPod: the iTunes Cleaner