How in the world can someone use over 100gig of hard drive space? I don’t do design (creators of large files) and I don’t do video (creators of really large files). The culprit? iTunes. My music collection has grown a lot in the past year and before I knew it, I had over 40 gigs of media just for my own entertainment. So here’s the trick. Most likely, your iTunes is importing your music as Apple Lossless Encoder which converts files at 4-5 times the size that you really need, unless you’re a music savant and need absolutely no compression. Here’s how you seriously decrease your iTunes library hard drive space: (just follow the click progression)

• Open iTunes
• From the top menu bar: iTunes > Preferences > Advanced > Importing
• “Import using:” > MP3 Encoder
• “Setting:” > High Quality (160 kbps) — so you don’t lose the quality of the recording
• Click “OK” to get out

Next we’re going to create a smart play list to find all of the files over 10MB

• File > New Smart Playlist > Choose “Size” > “Is greater than” > “10″

This will create a new play list that contains all of the songs/files that you want to convert

• Label your playlist “Songs > 10MB”
• Locate the playlist > select all the songs (Apple-S)
• Review your list and make sure there aren’t any Video, TV or Movies in there; unselect them if there are (Apple-click)
• Advanced > Convert Selection to MP3. Depending on how big your song collection is, this could take awhile (like hours)
• After it’s converted all of the files: go back to your main Music Library and follow these instructions: > View > Show Duplicates > Delete the larger duplicate file

If you don’t have the “Size” column set up in your column view, simply go to right-click (Control-click for apple users) on the light gray header bar that has “name,” “artist,” etc and choose “size” from the menu.

After you’re done, you’ll have a significantly smaller iTunes library and more hard drive space!