Transfer of Music files eating up HD space

So I recently installed Leopard, and before I erased and installed I backed up my music files onto an external hard drive, 35 GB or so of music.

After installing Leopard, I transferred the music files from the external hard drive to the Music folder in Finder.

Then, I opened up iTunes, and chose "Add File" and picked the file containing all of my transferred music. So as the music files are being transferred into iTunes, additional hard drive space is used.

So my question is, why is the music taking up additional space when being opened in iTunes, when I already transferred them from the external hard drive??

So in total, the music has now taken up 70 GB of space on my mac hard drive, what is going on?

 

Maybe you told iTunes to copy the file to the iTunes Music File when you add it to the Library?

To turn that off, go to iTunes Preferences, under Advanced and the General tab uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to Library".

To get rid of the existing duplicated music files, its under Finder > Music > iTunes > iTunes Music .

 

Ok nevermind, I found the problem. Turns out when iTunes imports music it duplicates the music files into its own little iTunes Music folder, so I just deleted the original and I got the hard drive space back.

Is it normal that iTunes does that?

 

Yeah Sam, thats exactly what happened, fixed it now, thank you so much.

 

Yeah, iTunes does that normally, which is helpful for most people who want everything organized for them, but more irritating for those that like to handle these things themselves.

No problem, ToshibaDude, happy to help out and glad you got your problem fixed .

 

i added my 70GB of music, that was organized how i liked it, and Itunes redid it. sucky! not worth sorting now

 

i really like what iTunes does with the organization andc copying, that way, to add music, I can just drag a folder full of music or multiple files straight to the dock icon, and it will import just fine. then I just delete it from where it originally was, and it is put in nicely organized folders for me, but honestly, it really doesn't matter how iTunes organizes the folders as the whole point of iTunes is for it to organize music in a way that is the most efficient, right in the App.

and the best way to transfer an iTunes library is to let iTunes do all the organization, and if you haven't, just consolidate the whole library pointed to an external HDD, which will just put the whole iTunes folder in that location. then simply copy that folder to the music folder in your main user directory, that way you will keep all of your Album Art, playlists, playcounts, ratings, etc. which is very useful when you have a lot of music.