After some googling I am not satisfied with the “state of the art” in duplicate detection and removal tools. There are a few, some that rely heavily on the “find duplicates” feature of iTunes and others that do more creative things that I am not sure I trust.
I think the right approach is to parse and dump the “location” fields of my iTunes Music Library.xml file. Then dump the file listing of the iTunes Music directory hierarchy. Massage the two lists so they are compatible and then diff them. All the diffs should be the extraneous stuff. From there I should be able to massage this diff list into a scrip that will delete them all.
Anybody have any concerns or known issues with this approach?
Mike