Vista Tutorial - Itunes - "clean" Library

OK, my old machine died but i got most of my stuff off the drive - so I have:

50 gigs of music on an external drive - it's a mix of one or two itunes libraries 40-50 gigs of music including tons of dupes in different folder architectures and generally a total mess.

I have about 7-8 gigs of music in an itunes library on the hard drive of the new machine. Some of it is probably - you guessed it - duped amongst the 50 gigs on the external.

I just got a 1tb drive.

My goal is to get one location with all my music, no dupes, in one itunes library without spending ten hours doing it or deduping manually.

* it would be nice to have those extra libraries in tact - ratings, playlists, etc. but I can live if i get one clean library.


My thought: Reinstall itunes put the library on the empty 1tb drive - and choose the copy all music to the itunes folder function and then add all my music? Then i have one lcoation with everything - i can back that up, move it to my hard drive so i don't need to access the external for it and then delete my current 50 gig mish mosh.

Thoughts? Better ideas? Words of caution? etc. etc.

thanks.