Over many years, the Taylor family's digital music collection has become very big and messy – comprising more than 12,000 tracks accounting for almost 60Gb spread over half a dozen PCs with many duplicates, mislabelled tracks and missing artwork.
In an uncharacteristic urge for neatness, I decided to tidy the collection into a single iTunes library. But I quickly discovered the limitations in the data management tools included with Apple's iTunes software for cleaning up disorganised music collections. For example, iTunes includes a duplicate-finder under the “File” menu, but it finds matches based on track name and artist only and users must remove duplicate tracks manually. Also, iTunes does not recognise that “The Stones” and “Rolling Stones” are probably the same band, or that “Track01” on The Beatles' White Album is the same as “Back in the USSR”.
Users can edit the track information, or metadata (click on a track and select “Get info” from the “File” menu), but it is both laborious and prone to error.