WTF??!! why is my ipod database so large

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dazzammm

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Hiya,
ive got a problem with my ipod database which im hoping someone can answer.

ive got 30,000 songs on itunes, about half have artwork but the actual data in itunes is stored on an external drive (i.e. not in my itunes folder)

i tried to copy my itunes folder in Music/MyMusic to discover that the folder is using 60gb of storage. As i said there is no actual music/podcasts etc in this folder so why is it using so much space? Ive browsed the folders, switched on hidden files/folders and just cannot find what is using all this space. Any ideas or does the size sound right?
 

cjmnews

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There can be several issues at work here. Technically this is your iTunes database, not just your iPod. It might be OK depending on iOS usage, possibly Album art, and changed iTunes settings.

You can use Windows Explorer to find the large files. How To Find Files Based On Size Using Windows Explorer Search Filters this may help find something.

1. Mobile Applications: If you have an iPhone or iPad and have bought / downloaded lots of apps they are stored in the iTunes\Mobile Applications folder. If you have devices with varying iOS versions, you can have multiple versions of apps as well. Mine is nearly 20GB and we are fairly limited in apps, and I prune apps that we don't use to reduce space. For people that download every app they hear about (I know people like this) and have multiple devices, they have 30-40GB in this folder.

2. Album Art: You have half of your music set up with embedded, that helps, but it also looks like Apple does not clean out their album art when you add it yourself. I have 29 songs without album art and my Album Art folder is just 843MB. I found one piece of art is about .0015GB, lots I find are much smaller, and if I simply divide that out, then it comes to 562,000 pieces of art, which is ridiculous, my library is under 30K items. I believe most of this is nesting folder overhead. You can always delete it and iTunes will recreate it, next time it starts. Doing this reduced mine to 27MB so quite a savings. If you only have some of your art added for your large collection, this folder may be filling up with art for your tracks without art. If you embed art into all your tracks then delete the Album Artwork folder, you could get a space savings as well. You can also disable it in Edit->Preferences, Store, uncheck Automatically Download Artwork and click OK. Mine is unchecked, and I still have the folder.

3. Your iTunes has been putting the tracks on the internal drive, not the external. In Edit->Preferences, Advanced the top box shows you the path where iTunes will put your music, videos etc. See if this got set to the local drive. If so, you may have an issue where you need to merge the two sets of files together (hopefully without duplicates) and put them in a good location. Respond back if this is the issue and we can walk you through that. If the path is still pointing to the external location, then you should be good. If it is pointing to the internal drive, then you need to look through some of your music to see if iTunes sees it has internal or external paths in the Get Info window, File tab. My guess is that older files will be external and newer files will be internal. A Consolidate to a single location will copy all the files to that location and combine them.

Miscellaneous extra space usage:

4. XML library - iTunes has the ability to share the library with other applications through the XML file. My XML file is 4 times bigger than my library file. I could imagine that your library file is around 5 MB, which would make your XML file around 20 MB. You can disable the XML file to eliminate the space as well as increase the performance of iTunes in Edit->Preferences, Advanced, uncheck Share iTunes XML With Other Applications and click OK.

5. Previous iTunes Libraries - iTunes makes a backup of your library when the format of the file is changing just in case the upgrade to the new version fails, you don't lose everything. I have a history of 17 copies of my library from 2010 to 2017. If you have a lot and a larger library this could be adding up as well.
 

dazzammm

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i managed to solve it.

when itunes has a problem it creates a tmp file - my ipod is usually at its max so ever time I try to sync my ipod and what i am trying to add exceeds the space on my ipod it creates a temp file.

to sum it up I had over 1000 temp files taking up 60gb!!!
 

cjmnews

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I had forgotten about the temp file problem. I personally never saw it. I think it was resolved a long time ago.
 

dazzammm

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my itunes is 18 months out of date as im XP and recent versions dont work on XP
 
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