Again let me thank you for your time. To start with my MBP is being setup as a media hub only. So I moved all of my music from another computer to an external hard drive and the decided to put it all on the secondary drive on MBP because of quicker importing times vs importing from external....maybe this was a mistake which I will address in the future.
from secondary drive I then imported into Music App with preferences set to have files stored on secondary drive vs primary drive. Purely a space driven decision.
Where your music files are located is entirely your choice and there is no right or wrong decision. The primary difference I can see is whether or not the music files are backed up. Time Machine only backs up your primary boot drive so unless you have other backup arrangements the files on the secondary drive will not be backed up.
The main question as I stated earlier is why are the files also on primary drive. What I plan on doing is deleting a few artists from music and see which depositories are affected. The hopefully I can delete the entire pool of songs on primary drive.
Understood.
localized? do a file info look. see link /Users/mymac/Music/itunes Music/Media.localized/Billy Joel/2000 Years - Millennium Concert/10 Allentown.m4a
what does it mean?
You got me on that one. I have checked all the Macs I can conveniently get access to and I have yet to find a similar folder. 🤷â€â™‚ï¸ All I can do is speculate that it is an artifact from some point in a previous version of iTunes or Music.
The main issues I have with the dupe options is lack of details. I have played with a lot of third party dupe finders etc and they all give me totally different numbers often large differences in numbers of songs. Plus most don't give you options to where the removed dupes go to other than trash can. I want to store in another location until I can verify they are actually the same or different song before deleting. The is a very powerful program called Simplify which does the best job but even that has limitations.
In Music, hold down the Option key, then on the menu bar choose File > Library > Show Exact Duplicate Items and Music will show you the tunes in your currently selected music library that are
EXACT duplicates. Additionally if you click on View > Show View Options (or while in Music press ⌘J) it will pop up a lost of the data columns that can be displayed which should help in identifying specific tracks. Unfortunately your only option from there is to DELETE one (or more) of the duplicates. The tunes are contained in a database and attempting to drill down into that database and manually move or remove a tune file risks damaging the entire database, potentially rendering it unreadable.
FYI: It is highly likely that many of those third party apps are based on APIs that provide access to the functionality built into Music and mainly provide a different GUI (Graphic User Interface).
One "belt and suspenders" precaution you could take before deleting the Music folder on your primary drive would be to Zip the entire music folder before you delete it. That way you could have some assurance that all of your files are preserved before deleting the Music folder on your primary drive.
CAUTION: the zip compressed Music folder will likely be
larger than the uncompressed folder. The reason for that is a subject for a different discussion. For now suffice it to say media files do not compress well — if at all.
