iTunes Swedish Death Cleaning

If you haven’t heard of “Swedish Death Cleaning”, the idea is that when you finally do drop dead, it’d be polite to not saddle whoever is taking care of your stuff with a big job of “is this important? should I keep it? should I just give all this away, or throw it away, because it’s just too much?”. Also, living with just the stuff that actually means something to you on a daily basis, as opposed to “I may want this someday, so I’ll keep it in my live gathering dust and generating clutter.”

I definitely need to do more of that in my physical life, but this weekend I embarked on it in my digital one. Like most people, when I finally had iTunes and no longer had an actually “how full are my shelves?” physical limit, I started hoarding music. I had a lot of stuff from my old CD collection, music I’d bought from iTunes, the StillStream library from when I was maintaining the music library for that station’s ambient robot, music from friends who’d lent me CDs, stuff I’d borrowed from the library and timeshifted into iTunes to listen to “later”, free releases from Amazon…basically a huge pile of stuff. Worse, I’d put all this in iTunes Match, so even if I cleaned out my library, turning iTunes Match on again would just put all the crud back.

In addition, my partner didn’t have a music library at all because her internal disk on her laptop was too small to keep all of her work and optional stuff as well. There was an offline copy of her old music library, and it too had also grown over the years from music lent to her, music I thought she might like, etc. She wanted to be able to pack up her CD collection and put it into storage, and maybe get rid of some of it as well. So we needed to take our old libraries and clean out anything that we didn’t want, and then see what each other might have that the other person might want afterward.

I spent a couple evenings last week ripping the CDs she didn’t have online yet into a separate library, so they wouldn’t be part of the existing mess, and then went through and did the following in a brand new library:

• Anything she actually owned got copied in. iPhoto’s ability to let me photograph the discs on the shelf and copy the text off of them came in very handy to make sure i got them all.
• Anything I didn’t find in the library on that pass got ripped into this new library.
• The not-previously ripped CDs in the secondary library were copied in.

At this point, she had a clean “definitely mine” library. Now it was time to clean mine up. I had done one pass already to strip it down, but I wanted to make sure that I both cleaned out my iTunes Match library and made a conscious decision, “keep or not” for anything in there that I didn’t already have in the stripped-down library.

The easiest way to do this was to to create a brand new, empty library, and connect that to iTunes Match, after turning on the “I want lossless copies” option — this is apparently new in Ventura, and is very welcome. Once this synced up, I could download and copy in only things I knew I wanted to keep. This meant I would actually have to look at the music and say, “do I really want to listen to this again?”, but not having to pull it out of an existing library would help.

In addition, my partner had asked me to give her a copy of music of mine that I know she likes; we share a liking for world music, and several different other artists. After a little thought, I came up with the following:

• There’s probably music in iTunes Match that we both want, and there’s definitely music I want. So let’s do this:
  • Create a new folder on a scratch disk that will contain music to add to her library.
  • Do the same for music I want to add to mine.
  • Drag those into the favorites in the finder.
  • Drag the Media folder from my target library to the sidebar as well. This will let me quickly check to see if a given release is already in my library , and if it is I can skip downloading it altogether, unless I want to give my partner a copy.
  • As I process each release in the Match library, I do the following:
    • If my partner would like it, download it.
    • If I want to keep it myself, open a Finder window using the Media folder shortcut and check if I have it.
      • If I do, simply delete it from the iTunes Match library (which also takes it out of iTunes Match).
      • If I don’t, download it.
    • If I downloaded it, right-click on one track in the iTunes list, and “Show in Finder”. This pops up a new Finder window with all the tracks for the release in it.
    • Command-Click on the folder name in the top bar of the window and go up one level to see the release in its enclosing folder.
    • Drag the release folder to the sidebar aliases for the “music to add” folders as appropriate.
    • Delete the tracks in iTunes. This removes them from the iTunes Match library, and iTunes Match as well.

This took the better part of two days to finish, but I now have two cleaned-up music libraries, and an empty iTunes Match. I am considering whether to retain iTunes Match, mostly because it’s not a “backup” — it’s just a convenient way to share music across my devices, and doesn’t guarantee I’ll get the original file back.

I’ve probably lost fidelity on some of the tracks I added to Match, and it’s possible some of them now have DRM. I will do another pass at some point and see; I’m not sure if it really makes a lot of difference to me right now, but I can always play them through Audio Hijack and re-record them to remove the DRM if I decide I want to.

We also wanted a list of “what you have that I don’t” for both the final libraries; I was able to do that with Google Sheets, but I’ll post that as a separate article.