Corrupted iTunes Libraries Merge Songs Approach?

[GlennSKroll]

Over the years, using iTunes on multiple computers and trying via multiple products to “clean” these libraries, I have now a real mess. Lots of “exclamation points” preceding song lines in the Song View for example.

I would like to “mine” the music files from these various iTunes instances with the goal of homogenizing the names of tracks, correcting misnamed tracks corrupted by use of previous 3rd party tools, correcting any associated metadata, re-associating tracks to albums.

I am thinking that the best approach may be to copy content from each of the separate itunes instances to a central folder structure, then use Songkong to do the corrections (and re-association to albums?) and, finally, to create a completely new iTunes instance and use it’s Add to Library function to end up with a “clean” iTunes library with no broken links between the iTunes Song View list and the actual song files.

Does this make sense? Is there a “smarter” approach that I should use? Is that approach already documented somewhere?

Thanks

Glenn

P.S. I license Songkong Pro and Jaikoz if that offers an idea on a better approach.

[paultaylor]

Glenn,

As long as you are not bothered about preserving iTunes specific metadata such as playcounts yes this makes perfect sense. For fastest operation I would run SongKong/Jaikoz with iTunes notification disabled then just import into new iTunes library when done.

[GlennSKroll]

Thanks Paul

I will be winter camping in New Hampshire until Monday but plan to implement the approach next week.

Glenn