Gathering Far-Flung Files

I've gotten several emails lately inquiring about scripts and apps that can assist with gathering up far-flung files from old music folders. It's the sort of thing that happens when you move to a new computer, upgrade iTunes, and add hard drives without doing the requisite housekeeping at the time (or on a regular basis). This is fairly typical:

Throughout the last 4-5 years, Iʻve ended up with an enormous bunch of music which is all on one of my hard drives, and Iʻd like to consolidate all of it, get rid of the dupes, junk/damaged recordings, etc. For instance, some of the data are backups of my old iTunes libraries that I created before upgrading to newer versions. I like the way the script addToLib works. but Iʻm looking for a way that I can accomplish the same thing without moving the music from each album folder, and then Trashing each folder individually.

I've been recommending using Music Folder Files Not Added which allows you to scan a folder any number of folders deep for files not in the iTunes database and optionally add them. Of course, you may still want to Trash the folder once the files are added—and this presumes you have "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" set—but you'll only have to move the single parent folder to the Trash and not dozens of sub-folders. And if duplicates are a problem, there's always Dupin, right?. Yes, still some work involved (after all, it took a long time for you to make that mess!) but operating on one set of parent folders at a time will make the process easier.