Three copies of all my songs!!! Help!

[alra111]

I recently got a new external hard drive. However, I noticed that the amount of used space was not adding up. I had too much used space for the amount of stuff I put on it. The only thing I've put on it is my iTunes library. When I examined it more closely today, I noticed that there are three copies of every song I own on it! for example, I have:

01 All That She Wants 1.m4a
01 All That She Wants 2.m4a
01 All That She Wants.m4a

When I go into iTunes and pick a song and select Show in Finder, the file that gets highlighted is the one with a 2 in the filename.

Naturally, the ideal outcome would be to get the 1 and 2 version deleted and have iTunes point only to the original with out the " 1" or " 2" suffix. However, I would like to avoid the daunting task of going through these folders one by one and deleting the extra copies. Can anyone offer a better solution?!?

I would be eternally grateful for your help.

Thank you!

 

[Chunkyjames]

my suggestion would be to go to "File" in the menu bar, and click on "Show Duplicates", although i'm not sure if that will work if the filename is appended. the other option would be to check the date it was added. if they are different dates for each of the three files, you can choose to sort your entire library by date added, and it should line them up in that order, and you can delete all of the ones that you don't want.
hope this helps...