ken meece's List: podcasts

• Since iTunes does not currently allow you to sort by the broken (‘!’ icon), it’s a laborious, manual process to remove all these track listings.

   

  That was until I found this ingenious process somewhere on the Apple forums:

   

  1. Make a smart playlist called “All Files” with this rule: “Artist” is not “123456789″ (or any nonsense name that won’t be in your library).

   

  2. Make a static playlist called “All Live Files”.

   

  3. Make a smart playlist called “Missing Files” with these rules: Match all of the following rules, Playlist is “All Files”, Playlist is not “All Live Files”

   

  4. Select all the files from “All Files” and drag them into “All Live Files”. The dead files marked (!) will not copy over.

   

  5. “Missing Files” will contain all of your dead files. Select all and delete. Voila, a nice clean iTunes library.

   

  I have these three playlists in their own folder. Whenever I gather more than a couple dead tracks for whatever reason, I delete all the tracks in “All Live Files” and repeat steps 4 and 5.
• Apple apparently added a new twist in the latest iTunes for Windows – the Delete option is disabled in a Smart Playlist. To get around this, I selected all tracks in my Missing Files folder, did Files\New Playlist from Selection (since it won’t let you drag & drop the dead tracks to a playlist), and then deleted them from there.
• The only thing I could find that iTunes lets you change in bulk in a smart playlist that carries over to the main library is Rating. So after going through your steps to set up the Missing Files smart playlist, people should rate all broken songs 1 star, then sort in the main library by rating, and then mass delete. Whew!
• On Windows, Shift-Delete DOES still work from a smart playlist (it never didn’t for me). Pressing shift and then right-clicking gives a delete option, but this didn’t seem to work. I just did it in iTunes 8.02 to remove all my dead files.

2 more annotations...

• To delete the matched files, hold down Shift (or, on a Mac, Option) while deleting.

• Gapless playback is always on in iTunes 7 or later unless the Crossfade feature is turned on. If Crossfade is on, only audio files that have the “Part of a gapless album” option checked and are capable of being played gaplessly will play with no gaps.

   

  http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304362