HT201812: Find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library

Learn about Find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library
Cattlebear
Level 1 (4 points)
iPhone

Q: Deleting duplicate songs when the duplicate ! symbol moves everytime a song is deleted


Hi

I uploaded a whole slew of albums for my father so he could have access to his music in the retirement home.

Each album was loaded once however I find now about half have been duplicated. No idea why.

In order to figure out which song is the "duplicate", as both play, I have gone in and put a tick in the "part of a compilation" field & hit OK .

This then shows the duplicate songs on the album as having that little "zero with the exclamation mark" in it .

It has always been that the second song is the duplicate & to date I have been deleting these songs however today I noticed that the duplicated marker thingee is moving or changing between the songs. EG after I have put the tick in every second song on the album has the "duplicate symbol" next to it .I delete the first song and the symbol now has moved on some songs ( not all) to the first song on the album.

While this is slightly less painful as I can delete 2 at once I am concerned as these CDs have been given to the local Hospice shop that I am now potentially deleting the "right" song not the duplicate and next time the duplicate will want locating when I now don't have the original CD anymore.

I have screen shots if I am making no sense.

Currently running Windows 8

 

D

Windows 8

Posted on May 21, 2015 4:05 PM

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Cattlebear

Q: Deleting duplicate songs when the duplicate ! symbol moves everytime a song is deleted

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  • by turingtest2,

    turingtest2 turingtest2 May 21, 2015 4:22 PM in response to Cattlebear
    Level 10 (85,368 points)
    iPod
    May 21, 2015 4:22 PM in response to Cattlebear

    You can use ctrl+click to select the relevant tracks from those displayed on screen, but I have a better solution for you...



    Apple's official advice on duplicates is here: Find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library. It is a manual process and the article fails to explain some of the potential pitfalls such as lost ratings and playlist membership, or that sometimes the same file can be represented by multiple entries in the library and that deleting one and recycling the file will break the other.

     

    Use Shift > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to display duplicates as this is normally a more useful selection. You need to manually select all but one of each group to remove. Sorting the list by Date Added may make it easier to select the appropriate tracks, however this works best when performed immediately after the dupes have been created.  If you have multiple entries in iTunes connected to the same file on the hard drive then don't send to the recycle bin.

     

    Use my DeDuper script if you're not sure, don't want to do it by hand, or want to preserve ratings, play counts and playlist membership. See this thread for background, this post for detailed instructions, and please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping.


    (If you don't see the menu bar press ALT to show it temporarily or CTRL+B to keep it displayed.)


     

    The most recent version of the script can tidy dead links as long as there is at least one live duplicate to merge stats and playlist membership to and should cope sensibly when the same file has been added via multiple paths.


     

    tt2