Will consolidating music cause metadata loss for songs that are in both locations?

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Level 1

8 points

Will consolidating music cause metadata loss for songs that are in both locations?

I am using iTunes 12.9.5.5 on an iMac using Mojave. I have music in ~/Music/iTunes Media/Music and ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music. Some of the music is duplicated, and I can see that the file location for different music in my iTunes is coming from both locations. It seems to be a mix, and I imagine the longer folder structure is from a prior version of iTunes. I'd like to consolidate these two libraries and get rid of duplicate files. By duplicate files I mean I have the same named MP3 in two locations but only one is the file for a song I see in iTunes. I also have duplicate songs but that is a different problem that I know how to solve.

My question is whether consolidating will cause me to lose metadata on the songs that I already have in my primary library but are also duplicated in this second file location? If so how do I avoid that?

Posted on Jun 17, 2024 2:50 PM

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Answer 1

ed2345

Level 9

62,858 points

Jun 18, 2024 6:55 AM in response to NYScallywag

Scallawag,

Consolidate goes thru each library entry and sees where the song file is located (the same thing you do manually by right-click > Show in Finder) and then

if the song file is in your designated Media folder (the one in Preferences) it takes no action
if the song file is elsewhere it puts a copy of the file into the designated Media folder and repoints the library entry to it

I am not aware of Consolidate doing anything that would change the metadata for a file, but you never know if there could be a weird situation, so make a backup first.

As you correctly note, Consolidate does not do anything about cleaning up duplicates, in fact in normal operation it creates new ones.

Also, it does not take any action about files in your folders that are not being referenced by iTunes/Music, be they duplicates or not. They just sit there.

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