Request: Best Practice for Consolidating Music

[chuckkyle]

Good Afternoon,

I am looking to find out if anyone has developed a best practice, checklist, how to, or something else that would assist in this scenario.

Equipment:

iMac Computer w/iTunes
MacBook w/iTunes
Dell PC w/iTunes

5 External HDD
1 IOMEGA Network Media Server

Okay, so I have purchased a 1TB Media Server and have it up and running, nothing transferred there yet. I have three computer with music and 5 external HDDs with music. The total files are probably, adding all of the external HDD and computers together, 30K. There are numerous duplications (probably 5%).

What would be the best way to bring all of this together on the Media Server, with corrected tags and no duplications? I use iTunes as my media player.

Thanks in advance.

Chuck

[wynlyndd]

create a folder structure on the NAS.

Mine is /Music_mainfolder/[Sorted]/

with artist sub folders for :
[1-F]/
[G-L]/
[M-S]/
[The]/
[T-Z]/
[Various]/

take one of your machines, preferably the one with the best recordings and such, Jaikoz it and change the base folders to point at folders on NAS, then save to store files on NAS.

Jaikoz the next machine, changing base folders to the NAS and save, then Jaikoz will tell you at some point, “hey I couldn’t save these files due to their already being a file named with this name.”

Guess what, that is probably a duplicate and instead of saving it, delete it.

go through each machine this way, and you move your files, and weed out some duplicates.

Simplistic steps and there may be more details but this works for me.