Deleting Songs from iTunes
iTunes is lacking one key feature, the ability to delete songs you don’t like when you aren’t letting it manage your music library.
The way I use iTunes is I have a network share where my music lives, and the various computers that I use to play music all import the music from there. Letting iTunes manage my music library isn’t an option.
When you delete a song in iTunes, if the song is managed by iTunes, it will offer to let you delete it; in the mode I’m using it, there’s just no way. It will remove it from the iTunes library, but not from disk.
I’ve been using 1 star to mean “I never want to hear this again”, meaning music I can safely delete. (The idea of deleting music never used to appeal to me, but now I realize there are some songs that I’m just carrying along that I really never will want to listen to again; why not get rid of them?).
DeleteOneStar
I wrote a little tool that will delete all songs with one star from both iTunes and from disk. It’s something that I only expect you’d want to run occasionally.
To use it: Get the .NET Framework 2.0 if you don’t have it already (here), Download the zip file (here), unzip it, and run the included executable.
It’s a console app, and will print the names of all the files it’s deleting as it’s deleting them.
If you want to preview what it would delete, without actually doing it, add the “print” command line option.
As with any tool that like this, back up your music before running this tool for the first time, to make sure it doesn’t do something silly like delete all your 5 star music, or all your music.
I’ve posted the source code to Google Code, here.
January 13th, 2007 at 12:51 am
Wow, this is cool. Just what I need to remove all my one starred tracks from both itunes and my disk in one fell swoop. Not tested the app yet, but have no reason to doubt it’s effectiveness. Great job dude, keep up the good work. Now I can continue to copy chunks of music over to my ipod from my hard disk, and tag all the rubbish with one star for later deletion from both the ipod, library and disk :D CHEERS.
June 19th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Thank you so much for this program! I’ve been wishing that iTunes would implement this feature for a while now, because I also rate songs as 1-star when I want to delete them.
February 7th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
The download of this program failed… It said not compatible with previous program? Any help?
February 17th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Is the author of this program still available, I would really like to us this program, but I am getting an error,
Many thanks