And here it is revealed in total, exactly what I actually use my personal lapper for: music/recording, pics, video, and word processing. Nothing more fancy than that. I’m not trying to use it to control my toothbrush, or launch a revolution in a small and unstable republic, or even get it to work faster. UNTIL I notice it’s not working fast enough and then I am compelled to figure out why: 9901, 44.78 gigs of music on my iTunes being my first and most aggressively suspected culprit.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. I am told. Especially since I have oodles and oodles of duplicate songs hanging around. Some intentional: the live version of “Stairway to Heaven” is much better than the studio version, but I want them both. However, having two, or, I am sorry, THREE versions of “Here Comes Your Man” by The Pixies is highly unnecessary. So what to do?

Apple Scripts are a wonderful, wonderful thing.

You mean AFTER you open iTunes? Well, first some general housecleaning: I go to Doug’s AppleScripts and use Super Remove Dead Tracks v2.0 to dump all the crap outright. Of which it seems I have A LOT. After that I move on to Corral All Dupes v2.0.1…again from Doug…nice freeware (make a donation if you got it). It shoves them all into a file. I delete.

And I am done.

And now I’m at a much more manageable best 9002 songs of my life.

Nice.