Mad props (to use some ‘hip’ language) to the developers of The Exorcist, a Media View plugin for Songbird that does two things, and does them very well:
- Finds and removes duplicate tracks from a Songbird library.
- Finds and removes ‘ghost’ tracks (files no longer present on the filesystem) from a Songbird library.
These two issues are the most frequent contributors to “iTunes library rot” on my Mac – try as I might, somehow my library always gets desynchronized from the actual filesystem and it’s just easier to rebuild it every few months. The Exorcist looks like it’ll help me avoid this problem!
I’ve been using this add-on particularly because Songbird adds all of my iPod’s songs to the library a second time, which creates duplicates. This is a bad thing for a few reasons:
1. It’s no fun listening to an album with every song repeating
2. When my iPod is removed, the songs stay in the library. If the library eventually reaches the track (say, through shuffle mode), then Songbird stops because it can’t find the song on any connected hard drives.
You should try clearing your iPod and refilling it from Songbird – it shouldn’t be adding those tracks to your library automatically, unless it isn’t linking them properly with existing library tracks.
I wish Songbird could add files from my SMB share… is there an addon for that?
@Tyler B Can’t you just have it watch the folder you are sharing?