Import Soul Wouldn’t it be nice if things just worked

Cleaning up the itunes media directory

In the process of moving my iTunes library to my new laptop (well its not so new anymore), iTunes has somehow managed to duplicate my entire library, creating a copy of every track, movie, tv show ect, and giving the duplicate some obfuscated name, i.e. ABCD.mp4

Besides being a large bunch of unnecessary files, they eat up a lot of HDD space, around 100GB.

After finally finding out what was eating up my HDD space it was easy to write a quick little python script to find and remove all of these files.

import re, shutil, os

CLEAN_FROM = r"C:\Users\Hugh\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media"
CLEAN_TO = r"C:\Users\Hugh\Desktop\junk"

FILETYPES = ["mp4","m4a"]

if not os.path.exists(CLEAN_TO):
    os.makedirs(CLEAN_TO)

pat = re.compile("[A-Z]{4}[.](%s)"%"|".join(FILETYPES))

print "Starting"
for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(CLEAN_FROM):
    for fname in filenames:
        if re.match(pat,fname):
            shutil.move(os.path.join(dirpath,fname),os.path.join(CLEAN_TO,fname))
            print "Moved: "+fname
print "Done"            

I do not guarantee this script will work for you and check what you actually delete before you actually do it