How to Tidy Up and Organize Your Music Library

6 Top Tips to Clean Up Your iTunes Library

Last Updated :  |  Author: Dev Team

Clean Up Music Library iTunes

Introduction

Having your iTunes or Mac Music App library a mess can slow you down when finding, loading and sorting your tracks. 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.

Tips for Cleaning Up Your Music Library:

Using Tune Sweeper - the Ultimate iTunes Cleanup tool

1. Remove Duplicates in iTunes or Mac Music App

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 music 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.

Tune Sweeper was originally created for use with iTunes, but now also allows you to delete duplicates in the Music app on macOS Catalina and newer (including macOS Sequoia).

Visit our support pages for a Tune Sweeper Quick Start Guide.

Remove iTunes Duplicates
Remove iTunes duplicates
Download Tune Sweeper

2. 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.

Clean iTunes library
Clean iTunes library - Fix track information

3. 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.

Download missing artwork
How to get missing album artwork for iTunes

4. 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.

Organize iTunes library - Remove missing tracks
Organize iTunes library - Remove missing tracks

5. 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.

Add music from your computer to your iTunes library
Add music from your computer to your iTunes library

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!

Tune Sweeper

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Tune Sweeper Tune Sweeper X

Your all-in-one tool for cleaning up your iTunes library. Remove duplicates, download artwork and more...

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