Mac HowTo: Remove All Dead Tracks from iTunes at once

We have all come across times when our iTunes library chooses to punish us with exclamation marks(!) all over the screen when we moved folders or deleted some tracks from the hard drive. If it’s a handful, one can manually delete the dead/missing tracks but otherwise it will take ages. Lucky for you, here’s a script which I have been using for over a year to keep my library free of dead tracks. Meet Super Remove Dead Tracks!

Note:
This script works only for iTunes on Macintosh Computers and has been tested to work with Snow Leopard and iTunes 9.2

Doug’s applescripts are very popular on the internet among Mac users. The script itself is very simple to use and understand. It will scan your full music library for dead/missing tracks and then delete them from the library. If a playlist remains with no existing song that will be deleted as well. Since, the process might take a few minutes and there is no progress slider an alert appears after every 500 tracks are scanned.

This script is very popular and when I last checked it had already been download almost 200K times.

How to Use:

Head over to this page and click on download.

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Unzip the archive and load the DMG file.
Copy the script to “[username]/Library/iTunes” as specified
Restart or Launch iTunes

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You should now see Super Remove Dead Tracks in the list of scripts. Click on the script and then click on Proceed and you’re done.

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The script will also save a list of deleted tracks so you’re peace of mind is guaranteed. You do now know what tracks have been deleted. Check out the screenshots for more help. You should consider running this once you iTunes starts reporting missing tracks or you notice the exclamation mark making way into your music library.

So all you Mac users go get this script if you don’t have it already. You will have loads of time to leave us a note, once this script saves you a ton of time and effort. Enjoy!