moved iTunes music and consolidated, now have 30GB vs 10GB!

[James Bond]

I moved my iTunes music files (10GB) onto a new bigger disk and then consolidated the directories. Everything seems to work fine - to be sure I have renamed the directories on the old disk.

Now I have got 30GB of files!

Scanning the directories, I do not see any obvious duplication nor in iTunes itself.

What is the easiest way to find and eliminate whatever is causing the extra space consumption?

Is there any way for me to switch iTunes back to use the original 10GB library?

 

[Urbansory]

Thats a huge difference, I never managed to consolidate my music, for fear of what it just might do.

 

[James Bond]

So, the full story...and again, I answer my own question.

In fact the consolidate failed several times due to a corrupted file that I eventually found and deleted.....but consolidate *only* copies.....and it copies *each* time that it thinks it needs to.

So, in fact for many files I had the original file.mp3 but also "file 1.mp3", "file 2.mp3", "file 3.mp3". etc. Hence the tripling of my library in size.

Solution for all this was to create a new empty iTunes library and set this in the preferences/Advanced. Then consolidate *again*.....this has the effect of establishing the new library as its library and it will copy the appropriate files from all other locations that it knows into it. After that you can safely delete the folder(s) from which you consolidated/copied.

So, in the end, if you understand how this works, consolidate is your friend!!