iTunes: Find and remove outdated song entries

Depending on the size of the music database, it is difficult to find old song entries in iTunes. This is especially important after manually deleting or moving tracks, as iTunes will then no longer find these songs and mark them with a leading exclamation mark. The many musical corpses significantly impair the overview, which is why it should be removed as quickly as possible.

Step 1: Find outdated songs in iTunes

A few tricks can be used to find outdated song entries in the iTunes library using on-board tools:

• Use the "File | New intelligent playlist" command to create an auxiliary list.
• Leave the "Meets the following criteria" option selected.
• Below this, activate "Artist" and "Is not".
• Then enter a non-existent name like "xyz" and confirm with "OK".
• Change the name of the new playlist to "All files" on the left.
• With the menu command "File | New playlist" you can now create a normal list and name it, for example, "Active tracks".
• Now use the "File | New intelligent playlist" command to create another list and define two rules for it.
• Set "Playlist", "is" and "All files" in the options. Then click on the plus sign on the right to add another rule.
• Set "Playlist", "Is not" and "Active tracks" there.
• Confirm the dialog with "OK" and name this list as "Missing titles".
• Now click on "All files" on the left and mark the entire list with the key combination [Ctrl] + [A].
• Drag and drop the content onto the "Active tracks" playlist. The outdated song entries are not taken over.
• This playlist therefore contains your entire music library excluding the incorrect song entries (marked with an exclamation mark).

Step 2: Remove the old song entries

• The automatically updated playlist "Missing tracks" then contains exactly those tracks whose references in iTunes are out of date.
• Switch to this playlist and select all tracks again with the key combination [Ctrl] + [A]. Use [Shift] + [Del] to delete the songs displayed after a confirmation prompt.

In order to keep your iTunes library in good shape, you should always keep the program up to date. Read here how to update iTunes.