by , 7:30 AM EDT, July 11th, 2007

iTunes does a great job of keeping track of your music library. Actually, it usually does a great job. But when it doesn't, you can end up with little headaches -- like crazy-long lists of tracks with exclamation points by their names.

All those little exclamation points represent tracks iTunes can't find any more. In other words, the dreaded dead track. These can come from a number of things like a moved iTunes library, tracks that you deleted outside of iTunes, or a corrupt iTunes library.

After one of the many times I moved my iTunes library to a new external hard drive, I ended up with duplicates for over half of my music collection, and each of those duplicates was also a dead track. There were way too many tracks to manually delete, but there are some options to automate the process.

iDupe I've mentioned iDupe before because it's a great little tool. In addition to helping you find duplicate tracks far more robustly than the built-in iTunes duplicate track feature, it also finds and removes dead tracks. If you want to see how iDupe works, be sure to check out my Quick Tip on removing duplicate tracks in iTunes.

iDupe finds duplicate tracks, and removes dead ones, too.

You can download iDupe at the Wooden Brain Concepts Web site. It costs US$8, and is well worth the shareware price.

Super Remove Dead Tracks Super Remove Dead Tracks is a cool AppleScript that sifts through your iTunes library looking for and removing dead tracks. If a playlist contains nothing but dead tracks, it removes the empty playlist, too.

Super Remove Dead Tracks runs as an AppleScript in iTunes.

This easy-to-use AppleScript does exactly what it says, and it does it well. Super Remove Dead Tracks is available at the Doug's AppleScripts Web site. It is donationware, so be sure to pay what you think it is worth.

Of course, the best way to ensure you don't have problems with your iTunes library that require measures like these is to keep a good backup. For those times where your backup isn't available, however, it's nice to know there are apps out there that can help.