Music found in two folders with duplicates

My apologies if this question has been asked before...

Recently one of my playlists "disappeared." I searched a few forums and tried a few suggestions, but I felt the best resolution was to retrieve the iTunes library files from my backup. This worked fine, but I noticed one of the songs I recently imported was no longer in iTunes, but still could be found within the iTunes folder in Finder. I didn't think this was a big deal and something must have happened to the library database that caused it to crash. But this prompted me to start looking at the folders and files in my iTunes library. First I noticed that I had the same music in two locations:



myHomeFolder>Music>iTunes>iTunes Media>Music and myHomeFolder>Music>iTunes>Music



But I found they were not exactly the same after checking the info of both music folders. I found the music in the iTunes Media>Music folder was about 4 times the size of the other. After viewing the files in the folders of the iTunes Media>Music folder I found there are duplicates of every song in every album in this folder. In some cases there are three copies of the same song.



Note that the same song is found within the same album folder. For instance: within the Adele 19 album/folder I have the following files:







And the one iTunes is using is:







My first question is why do I have two different locations for my music? It appears that iTunes is only using the files in the iTunes Media>Music folder. Can I delete the iTunes>Music folder?



Why do I have two and three duplicates of the same song? How did this happened? What do I do about it? Should I leave everything as is? Should I start deleting files? How do I prevent this from happening again?



I am using a MacBook Pro with OSX 10.8.4 and iTunes 11.0.5. I allow iTunes to consolidate my files and reorganize the files.

Thanks.

via iLounge Forums http://forums.ilounge.com/mac-pc-itunes-tools/278292-music-found-two-folders-duplicates.html