Itunes Remove All Songs From Library

[Trisha Quercioli]

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If your iTunes library is getting a bit out of control, you can clean things up by deleting music you no longer listen to. When you remove songs from your iTunes library, they'll be removed from any devices they're synced to next time you sync. When you delete songs directly on your iOS device, they are completely removed. Songs that you've purchased may be hidden when you delete them, and can be unhidden with iTunes.

Every time I remove a song from a playlist on PC, then sync to iPhone via iTunes, the playlist is updated (i.e. it doesn't include the removed song), but the song is still in the library. That adds up over time. Now a bunch of "rogue" songs have accumulated that aren't in any playlists that take up quite a bit of storage. Any way to get rid of them?

If you are someone that learned to drive a car without an automatic transmission, your method is akin to manual shifting. You could also enable Apple Music or iTunes Match and then you no longer have to micro-manage which I played songs get removed as your device keeps track and cleans automatically when you run low on free space on device.

iTunes has deleted my imported music library several times over the past few years. I use iTunes and an iPhone (currently iPhone 13 but the phone model is not related to the problem). iTunes kept the library with over 1,000 hours of music and dozens of play lists working just fine for many years (going back to iPod days). Starting about 2 or 3 years ago, iTunes on random days/months deletes the entire imported music libary and all the play lists reverting only to a handful of songs purchased through iTunes. I start iTunes one day and everything is just gone.

But other than that, iTunes does not randomly delete songs. If songs become unplayable in your iTunes Library (as opposed to disappearing from your library), they will have an exclamation mark placed next to the title to indicate that iTunes can no longer find the file for that song. This is usually because the file or the path to the file, has been renamed, moved or deleted - but not by iTunes. If this is what has happened, we can offer tips to find them again. Turingftext2 has a tip on it (if I can find it), or I can offer assistance.

Just to add to the fiend's post above what you describe sounds like the issue I address in the link he posted. My first thought would be that you have some anti-virus software that disrupts iTunes when it is updating the library. Look for hidden .tmp files in the iTunes folder.

If you're new to iPhone, or have never needed to delete music from your iPhone before, it may not be immediately apparent how to delete songs or albums from your device. Do not fear, though! In this article, we'll guide you through 4 easy ways in which you can remove music from your iPhone.

Before deleting music from your device, or syncing your iTunes library with your iPhone, we highly recommend backing the device up using iTunes or a third-party software. You can create a backup of your iPhone by connecting it to iTunes > click your device icon > click Back up Now.

Unfortunately, the iPhone currently provides no way to find which of your tracks are duplicated, so the use of a computer is necessary. We will firstly remove any duplicate songs from iTunes (or Apple Music), then sync your cleaned library with your iPhone, ensuring that your iPhone's library is the same as your iTunes library.

If you have a little extra time and patience to find and remove your iPhone duplicates, you can use iTunes' inbuilt functionality. iTunes does a great job of listing the duplicate music in your library, however, it does not provide any help in deciding which files to remove, which Tune Sweeper can intuitively and automatically do.

Google may be referencing help from a previous version. Assuming you are using version 4x and are saving your scores locally (I don't know about the cloud), then you can just go to the scores folder and delete the files you no longer want. They will no longer appear when you launch the program. The path on my computer is C:\Users\garyt\Documents\MuseScore4\Scores and yours should be similar, except reflecting your username.

I'm not sure, of course, but I believe that OP is not asking how to delete score files, but is asking how to remove scores from the list of scores on the Home tab of MuseScore. If he's not asking that, I am.

The list on the Home tab is simply a list of links to the most recently used files. As far as I know, it is not yet possible to delete an individual entry there. You can only delete all entries (File -> Open recent -> Clear Recent Files). The scores stored in the score folder are of course not deleted!

But as far as I remember, there is a feature request to implement the deletion of a single entry.

a) Is it possible for me to add a note to that existing feature request? If so, do you know where I can find it? (I've never been involved with any feature request, so I don't know where to look.) I'd like to ask them to make it possible to store a FOLDER in that list (and none of the files therein).

b) When I click on File / Open Recent, there is no option to "Clear Recent Files". Only a list of ALL the files I've opened/created since I installed MS4: several hundred, the list takes nearly five minutes to scroll from top to bottom. I suspect that a sizeable majority of the files in this list no longer exist. And MS doesn't even remove the entry when it finds out that the file doesn't exist :-(

When I tried simply deleting the JSON (actually, just renamed it so I could "un-delete" it if necessary), it found an old copy of the Recent Files list (about 8 months old) somewhere. After a fair amount of digging, I found this old list in C:\Users[username]\AppData\Roaming\MuseScore\MuseScore4.ini under the [project] settings, the second item is recentList=, followed by a number of filepaths.

Now the Recent Files list is empty and in so launching, MS built a new JSON file with no entries. I opened a file and the JSON file now shows only that file and the INI file still shows no values in its recentList.

I didn't realize that this command has completely disappeared. That's a real shame, because this list can get very long in MuS 4 - unlike MuS3: there is at least an upper limit on the number of entries (I think max 20 entries).

This is a shot from musescore 4. If clearing recent files is what your looking for. I' not sure what your calling your "library". I always hoped they would come up with a way to delete one at a time rather than the whole bunch.

W11.

A few weeks ago, I reset MU4. That deleted recent score.Today there were about 20 to 25 scores in the recent list. I went to File>Open recent and scrolled down the list. When I got to the bottom, there was Clear recent, but grayed out. I selected it, it turned black and I was able to clear the files. I don't remember if it was there before or not. but it is there now. Maybe 25 scores isn't enough. But I'm going to keep track now.

Still not there for me. I'm on Windows 11 and MuS 4.2.1 ("You're up-to-date") And my list has WAAAAAAY more than 25 entries: somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 entries. (It's hard to count them because the list moves so quickly and smoothly :-) Exactly the opposite of what some people have complained of.)

Navigate to the folder with the scores in it. Delete or move the scores you want removed from the "open recent" list. close an reopen the program. CAUTION Back up or move any files you don't want to permanently delete. You can always move them back into the folder later if you want to work with them again.

Sorry, that's not the case. The 'Recent scores' list currently includes MANY files that have been deleted for anywhere from days to weeks. The only reason it's not longer than weeks is because I wiped it completely (by deleting the file as I described above) a few weeks ago. Before that, the list included files that had been deleted months ago.

But how do you delete just SOME of the files? I've followed all of the instructions, and can't find anything. I'm on a Mac. Sometimes I DL a posted file from the forum, but then I want to get rid of it. On the Home > Scores page, why can't I simply right-click on an icon and get a Delete Score option?

You would modify that .JSON file that is described above. (See HildeK's and then my note from Mar 11, 2024.) Each line in the file corresponds to one entry in the Score "library" on the Home tab.

Oops! I missed that you are on a Mac. I don't know for sure, but I would assume that a) it will work and b) it will be similar in process, but the file might be stored elsewhere? If it's not in the place that HildeK pointed me, try just searching with the Mac's file explorer ("Finder"?) for "recent_files.json".

> why can't I simply right-click on an icon and get a Delete Score option?

Unfortunately, it is not (yet) possible to delete individual entries from this list. As far as I know, there is a request to implement this in one of the next versions. However, I do not know with what priority this will be processed.

So far you can either search for the named file "recent_files.json" and change it with a text editor or delete all entries (the files themselves remain) using "clear recent files", which is possible on a Mac, or simply wait until they have moved down the list until you no longer see them on the page.

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