3 Ways to Reduce the Size of Your iTunes Library

What's the biggest iTunes library? There is not technical maximum library size for iTunes. But the larger the iTunes library size is, the slower your iTunes will turn to. This article will share 3 ways to reduce iTunes library size to release free space and speed up your iTunes.

Reduce the size of music files

The size of music files may vary greatly from different parameters such as bit rate and channels. If you are not as discriminating as some music enthusiast, the 192 kbps bit rate is enough for quality. So how to reduce the size of music files? See the specifics below:

1. First go to iTunes > Preferences > General > Import Settings > MP3 Encoder and set quality to Higher Quality (192 kbps).

2. Create a Smart Playlist from File > New Smart Playlist.

3. Set "Bit Rate is greater than 192" as the criteria to find out all matched music files.

4. Select all music files by Command + A or dragging.

5. Right click and select Create MP3 version. This will take a lot of time if your music collection is very large.

6. Go to Library > Music and show duplicates by File > Display Duplicates.

7. Sort by Bit Rate (If bit rate column doesn't appear, right click on any column and select Bit Rate. You are recommended to repeat this process to show Size column to see how much size is reduced for each music file - from 256 to 192, about 3MB - each song. )

8. Delete the larger music files.

Maintain Multiple iTunes Libraries

Be default, your media files, such as video, TV shows, music, podcasts, are stored in the same iTunes library. However, you can sperate them by creating different libraries to store different types of files. And it's very easy to switch between different libraries. To do it, just hold down Option (or Shift for Windows) when starting iTunes to choose library or create a new one. Learn more about iTunes library here.

Delete Duplicates in iTunes

Duplicates in iTunes are also the main reason why your iTunes library is so large. To delete duplicates in iTunes, go to Music, Movies, TV Shows, etc. and click File / Display Duplicate to show all duplicate in iTunes. Then remove the larger or older files. See more details about how to remove duplicates from iTunes library >>.