I hate iTunes on Windows with the heat of a thousand suns. It is a pox on my existence and it has cost me hours of pain and suffering. I'm sure it's all unicorns and spun sugar on MAC, but as a guy using Windows with dozens of gigabytes of music on a shared file server that I've ripped since the first CD I ever purchased, it's hell on earth. I could manage all my music with Zune (and I do have a Zune Pass for leasing music I don't want to buy) but there are iDevices in the house and iTunes is what it takes.

Did I mention it sucks? It's slow, frustrating, and is effectively just a giant listbox that exists only to mess up my music library and occasionally try to sneak Safari and QuickTime onto my machines. But enough about Satan, let's yank some dead tracks, shall we?

At some point, I ended up with hundreds of dead tracks and/or duplicates. I ended up with "LL Cool J - I Need Love 1.mp3" and "LL Cool J - I Need Love 2.mp3" along side the original. It was taking up many gigs of duplicate space. I searched for *1.mp3 and *2.mp3, etc, and deleted the dupes on disk.

However, this then left me with a big iTunes database that THINKS it has music, even though the file on disk is long gone. Now, as a napalm-style solution, you CAN delete your iTunes library completely and re-add it. It'll add just files that exist, but you will lose any edits, artwork, etc, you may have added. This solution wasn't cool for me so I say, nay nay.

There's a MILLION stupid little shareware apps that purport to fix duplicates and remove dead tracks. In my case, removing dupes was easy, but yanking dead tracks isn't worth me spending money.

Instead, I sat down tonight and decided to write a script in C# that said something like "foreach track, does that track exist where the system thinks it should be? No? Delete it."

A little googling with Bing, however, brought me to a three year old post at ScarTech where Shawn (shame he's stopped blogging) did the code for me! Yay. Here's a bit of his code, using the iTunes COM SDK. His stuff was written using Visual Studio Express 2008, but I upgraded to 2010. Also, I'm on 64-bit and his COM code expects x86, so I changed the project properties from AnyCPU to x86 and it worked great.

//create a reference to iTunes
iTunesAppClass iTunes = new iTunesAppClass();
//get a reference to the collection of all tracks
IITTrackCollection tracks = iTunes.LibraryPlaylist.Tracks;
for (int i = trackCount; i > 0; i–)
{
      IITTrack track = tracks[i];
      if (track.Kind == ITTrackKind.ITTrackKindFile)
      {
            IITFileOrCDTrack fileTrack = (IITFileOrCDTrack)track;          
            //if the file doesn’t exist, we’ll delete it from iTunes           
           if (fileTrack.Location == String.Empty || !System.IO.File.Exists(fileTrack.Location))            
          {
                  fileTrack.Delete();
            }
      }
}

Here's before:

So I ran it...

...and here's the afterparty:

Looks like it checked 7219 tracks and removed 570 dead ones. Yum.

I'd also encourage you to check out the second part of Shawn's iTunes and C# tutorial series where he creates a duplicate finder that knows to keep the higher bitrate song.

You can download Shawn's code here but as he hasn't blogged in a LONG time, I've mirrored it at SkyDrive. Big thanks to Shawn at ScarTech for saving me my evening and for tidying up my iTunes.

Good stuff, the internets.