Delete multiple duplicate songs

Choose the remove duplicates option from the iTunes menu

Did anyone come up with a fix for this problem?

File > Show duplicates. This will pull up all the duplicated songs in your library. You will have to go through and delete them all separately.

Or if your iTunes music folder (folder when you click on music) doesn't have duplicates, then you can delete all the songs in your library and the drag the itunes music folder back over and it should just have one copy of everything.

I am having the same issue. There are thousands of them. Deleting them 1 by one is not going to happen and if I delete them all and then start fresh won't I lose
all of the rankings and play counts?

I had the same problem.....thousands of tunes but loads of doubles even triples. I used the show duplicates option and pressed delete but made the stupid mistake of sending them straight to the trash...when i went back to view my 'beautifully organised' library, my WHOLE library had been deleted... Is this because I didn't go thru the duplicate list and and remove them one by one? Fortunately I had on old external hard drive with alot of my music still there but I am still faced with the same problem...loads of doubles...What do you suggest? Cheers

I have been using the not particularly good method of manually deleting the duplicates. Here is the rub. One of the entries appears to NOT have a file associated with it. If I delete that one there is no dialog about trashing the original mp3. The problem is that there is no way to tell which one to delete.
Now I am afraid that if I use the script I found to delete duplicates that it might delete the "real" one.

What I did...
I saw that the dupes were actually dupe files too so I did this.
Go through each folder in windows explorer and sort by date. (the dupes will sort out)
Select them and delete.
Then remove iTunes and reinstall.
You can do the first step last or first I believe.
This will also obviously free up a lot of disc space.

Message was edited by: doughboyracer

Message was edited by: doughboyracer

Ahhh. But if I do this and then put all of the music back into the library, I lose all of my playlists, play counts, and ratings. I could do that but I really don't want to lose the ratings for a few thousand songs. I probably could back up the playlists by exporting and importing them but I don't think I could hang on to the others.