How to clean up and organize your iTunes library
Most people’s iTunes libraries are unkept, cluttered, and just a bit of a mess. This can slow you down when finding and sorting your tracks and is just rather annoying. Therefore, we have provided a list of six of the best top tips to arm you in the fight to sort out your jumble of music to ultimately have a nicely organized, clean iTunes library.
Clean Up Your Music Library - Jump to a section in the guide:
Using Tune Sweeper - the Ultimate iTunes Cleanup tool
1. Remove iTunes Duplicates
Are all the tracks in your iTunes library actually unique? Duplicate tracks are often a major cause of an overly cluttered library and removing them can help to maintain an order to your music not to mention save disk space. However, to manually sort through your entire iTunes library looking for duplicate tracks would be incredibly tedious, not to mention time consuming. As iTunes' inbuilt method of showing duplicates is very basic, a third-party software application, such as Tune Sweeper is often needed.
Visit our support page for more information on removing duplicates.
2. Download missing artwork
When scrolling through iTunes libraries, it is common to find tracks with a generic music note as the artwork rather than the album cover itself. By finding the correct artwork for such tracks can speed up the rate that you sort through your library. While there are several ways of doing this you can use the link below which can find and download missing artwork automatically.
Visit our support page for more information on downloading missing artwork in iTunes.
3. Remove missing songs with exclamation points
Removing the track entries from iTunes which are no longer available on your computer can go a long way in your quest to clean up music library.
Sometimes while scrolling through your iTunes library, you will stumble across tracks that are listed but will not play. An exclamation point appears next to such tracks because although they are still listed, they are not stored on your hard disk.
Find out more about how to scan your library for these missing tracks and how to remove them.
4. Add music from your computer to your iTunes library
There may be music on your computer that has not been added to your iTunes library and it can be time consuming to find all these tracks to create one complete source of all of your music and make sure that your iTunes library is up to date.
Check out our article for more information on adding music from your computer to iTunes.
5. Fix nameless and incorrectly labelled songs
Your iTunes library may contain songs that are incorrectly labelled or even without information all together. This can make it hard to sort through your tracks and access the songs you desire, helping you to clean up your iTunes library.
Check out our article for more information on fixing nameless and incorrectly labelled songs.
6. Back up your library
It is important to backup your library just in case things go wrong. This means that you won't lose all your music if such a tragedy does occur. Make sure that a backup is made up to an external drive so that if your computer is damaged you can still recover your music.
You now have all the tools needed to transform your messy library into a clean iTunes library!