Why does iTunes create multiple exact copies of my music files and hide them from view in Finder?
Quite a while ago I downloaded an Indie/Rock Playlist and added it to iTunes, and it was all good. There weren't any doubles of songs or anything, in iTunes. But just now I've noticed that in the folder where iTunes saved these songs, there are additional copies of the files with a 1, 2, or 3 appended at the end of the file name.
I can only see these files from the command line, using the "ls" command for example. Finder doesn't show them, not even when I set Finder to show hidden files.
$ ls -l
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 7449751 25 Mar 14:35 106 Senseless 1.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 7449751 25 Mar 14:35 106 Senseless 2.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 7449751 25 Mar 14:35 106 Senseless 3.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 7449751 25 Mar 14:35 106 Senseless.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 12230233 25 Mar 14:42 107 Shameless 1.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 12230233 25 Mar 14:42 107 Shameless 2.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 12230233 25 Mar 14:42 107 Shameless 3.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 12230233 25 Mar 14:42 107 Shameless.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 5977984 25 Mar 14:45 108 Shocked But Not Surprised 1.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 5977984 25 Mar 14:45 108 Shocked But Not Surprised 2.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 5977984 25 Mar 14:45 108 Shocked But Not Surprised 3.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 5977984 25 Mar 14:45 108 Shocked But Not Surprised.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 4913269 25 Mar 14:42 109 Skeletons 1.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 4913269 25 Mar 14:42 109 Skeletons 2.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 4913269 25 Mar 14:42 109 Skeletons 3.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy staff 4913269 25 Mar 14:42 109 Skeletons.mp3
...
Some songs only have one or two copies (never more than three), and some songs don't have any. Does anyone know why iTunes does this? And does anyone know how to make these files appear in Finder?
Update: I did a search on the rest of my music and found two other albums with the same problem. One has doubles of every song, the other has triples. Also, Finder appears to be showing the duplicates now, I don't know why. Maybe has to do with the OS X update that happened a couple days ago.
Solution 1:
This is likely happening because of the playlist and letting iTunes sort your music. Everytime you import the playlist the playlist imports the songs and then iTunes organizes those songs. For some reason it doesn't realize that's importing already organized songs. Find the playlist and delete it and the problem should go away chances are it's an .m3u.