iTunes problem

[rom661]

OK, somehow I have just never understood how iTunes manages files. If someone can make a lightbulb come on for me I would vastly appreciate it.

 

A week or so ago, just as I booted up my Mac mini my power conditioner went off. Still don't know why it did but it reset after a minute or so. When I tried to bring up the mini it couldn't see the hard drive. I booted it off the disk, figured out I was going to have to reload so did a diagnostics, reformatted and loaded the OS. I use a SSD and an external drive for music connected via Firewire. I told iTunes where my music was. It would try to play it but tell me it couldn't find the file. I think I told it to add to iTunes or something to that effect. It worked, sort of.

 

Now I have two copies of virtually every song. The first one has a question mark beside it, the second doesn't. The second will play, the first gives me an error message saying the file can't be found. When I manually pointed it at the song on the external drive it asked if I wanted to use that to find the rest. I said yes and it did. Now I still have two copies of everything. I know you can find duplicates but is there a way to get rid of them? And, more importantly what did I do wrong?

 

Chris, this is the kind of thing that I think would be a natural for the FAQ/trouble shooting section of the site. I know a lot of customers are confused by the iTunes approach to this, as opposed to PC.

 

If anyone has the patience to take this (me) on, thanks.

 

Rick