Joe Mcmahon

Q: Every Single Song in iTunes 12.4.3 on Windows 10 is duplicated

My iTunes has thousands of songs in it and recently I discovered that every single song in my library had been duplicated. These duplicates do not play but they still appear as normal in the iTunes library. I have tried deleting these songs by selecting show all duplicates but the original song come up also in the duplicates (In other words, my whole library shows up in the 'Show Duplicates' section). This means I have to find out which song is the duplicate one by one. Due to the fact I have thousands of songs, I do not have time or patience to do this. Is there any way I can remove all duplicates at once?

iPhone 5s, iOS 9.3.4

Posted on Aug 25, 2016 3:56 PM

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Q: Every Single Song in iTunes 12.4.3 on Windows 10 is duplicated

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  • by turingtest2,

    turingtest2 turingtest2 Aug 25, 2016 7:27 PM in response to Joe Mcmahon
    Level 10 (87,700 points)
    Apple TV
    Aug 25, 2016 7:27 PM in response to Joe Mcmahon

    iTunes may create duplicates if the same content is repeatedly added from outside the media folder when it is set to make copies of anything that is added to the library, or is added from an external drive that hosts the media folder that was offline when iTunes was launched.

     

     

    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 any others.

     

    Start in the Songs view. Use View > Show Duplicate Items (pre iTunes 12.4) or File > Library > Show Duplicate Items (post 12.4) and then click Same Album to display exact 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 (Windows only) 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 on the script, 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