Duplicate Songs in iTunes

I, too, am having this same problem; three entries for each song. The first one is corrupt and the other two play so I need to delete the first two. Instead of 7,000 plus songs in my list I now have over 19,000! Any advice to quickly resolve without having to delete all of my playlists will be greatly appreciated.

I have this issue as well. Every now and then my iTunes seems to re-import all my songs so I now have three to four copies of the songs. Is there anyway to either stop this from happening or mass delete duplicates as it will take me at least an hour if not more to sift through them all and delete each and every double.

I also have this problem. I wondered if it was because my external HD (where I have all of my music now) is not where iTunes stores its "iTunes Library.itl" and "iTunes Music Library.xml" files.

I had the added problem of when I deleted the duplicate songs, I could then not plan the remaining copy (I believe there was only one real copy of the actual sone file and when you deleted one, the song file was deleted. My work around for this was to delete all duplicates (to the Recycle Bin) and then to RESTORE them from the Windows Recycle Bin. This left me with only one working song when working in iTunes. But this was a long fix (3K+ songs on my iPod Touch). Strange that nobody has replied with any support on this issue.

Ernie

same problem...going nuts...solutions would be fantastic!!!!!!!

I have the same problem and I'm using an external hard drive. I have already started deleting the songs one by one from my music as this seems to be the only way to do it without deleting the original. Firstly, I have had to click on every song to find the original and delete the ones that cant be played..

You cant go into my music where the files(albums) are stored and delete them, because you might be deleting the original song!

My Itunes, before this happend had 5k tunes now it had 12k, its strange cause not all songs are duplicated. I cant see there being any other way of doing it!

please note that this has become an endless string of people with this problem and no one has actually repsonded to offer us help.

I NEVER update itunes because everytime I do I end up with zillions of duplicates - I now have 60K songs in my library and it takes me three months to chip away at the duplicates...and then of course there's a new itunes version.

please fix this so that people don't have to delete one song at a time.

What you can do is, two ways of getting round this, but no quick solution.

1. Create a smartplaylist with a filter condition that has 'Date Added' and make the date a week or so before you imported all your music.
Now go into this playlist and go to View>Show Duplicates. When you have done this, click on the album column header to sort everything by album.
Now you can sift through all the duplicates and mark them for deletion (I use the comment column for this purpose), then once done go to the library and hunt down the marked tracks and delete them.
Repeat this process until you are happy that all the duplicates are gone.

2. You can use this little app, Find Duplicates, to find the duplicates on the HD, delete them and then reload your library once it's complete

I do everything you say, but when I go to view/show duplicates I cant access it, its not embossed like the other options??

2. Where do I find little applications?

You can download it here, http://geocities.com/hirak_99/goodies/finddups.zip , same as the link above.
🙂

I bought a program from MarkelSoft called Duplicator Eliminator. One click to see all the dups, one click to remove. You don't have to worry about reloading library or anything out of the ordinary. Sometimes you hate to spend the money for using something only a couple of times but I have had to use it several times, new computer, hard drive crash etc.

I've found if I delete a duplicate, the second track will only play as long as the first one is in the trash. Empty the trash and try to play the track again and it says the original file could not be found, so it can't be played. This happens whatever order you keep/trash the duplicates.

Thank you for your helpful thoughts - I wish I had read them before I started deleting duplicates...ahhhhhhh

I'm just going to live with it until Apple does a fix - now I have to move all the music from my old computer via my iPod to the new one - ONCE AGAIN

bummer...