iTunes 9 showing duplicates on quite a bit of my library?

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Level 1

8 points

iTunes 9 showing duplicates on quite a bit of my library?

I recently added a bunch of new music and since most of the music was scattered about in different folders and what not. I decided to click on my music library while in iTunes, then I selected all songs and deleted them but kept the actual files. So at this moment my library shows nothing at all, I then refreshed the library by going "add to library" and let iTunes add all of the songs again.

After it was completed I have quite few of the exact same songs duplicated. If I double click either of the duplicated songs they will both play but if I right click and select "show in Explorer" there's only one song like there should be.

Does anyone know what's going on? I've done this before by deleting the songs but keep the files and never had any problems.

MBP 13.3" 2.53, Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on Oct 12, 2009 6:00 PM

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Answer 1

Ibis Ghost Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 13, 2009 2:08 PM in response to Ibis Ghost

Any ideas, guys?

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Answer 2

Oct 13, 2009 2:43 PM in response to Ibis Ghost

hey man, this just happened to me the other day. i had a new hard drive put in and when i re-added itunes/music alot of songs were duplicated. the wierd thing is that while it happened to alot, there are some songs on albums that were not duplicated. was wondering if anyone out there could help. thanks

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Answer 3

QuickDraw

Level 3

704 points

Oct 13, 2009 5:13 PM in response to Ibis Ghost

The first thing that I would do personally is right click on each of the files in question and then select "Get Info" and find out if they are actually listed in different directories. It could be that you have multiple copies of the same file but each in different directories. Also there is a possibility that iTunes is picking up on "Previous iTunes Libraries" listings in your directory structure somewhere.

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Answer 4

Ibis Ghost Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 13, 2009 11:22 PM in response to Ibis Ghost

I took your advice and looked at the "Get Info" and it seems as though for some odd reason I have duplicated some songs. iTunes seems to have added the same songs but renamed them and kept the old songs.

I've got a bit of a mess to clean up. For some reason it's only showing like this in some folders and not all of them but as big as my library is, it's a big job. I don't even know where to start to fix this.

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Answer 5

QuickDraw

Level 3

704 points

Oct 14, 2009 12:57 PM in response to Ibis Ghost

This has happened to me before as well, and I'm sorry to say that there is no way (that I found anyway) to take care of this accept just go into iTunes and select the ones that are duplicates and choose to delete them. I would be very careful though. Another way you could go about it is to just make sure you have all of your information/music...etc., backed up and then just delete all of it and then add it back in being careful before hand to make sure that there is only 1 copy of each music file in the iTunes directory before you add it all back in. Of course it's entirely up to you how you go about it, but that latter way is the way that it would be the easiest for me.

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Answer 6

Ibis Ghost Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 14, 2009 1:29 PM in response to Ibis Ghost

Thanks, and I do have it backed up on a external USB drive. However there's only some music the my wife has downloaded from iTunes, which brings me to this question.

Does anyone know if I just lost/removed/deleted any songs she has downloaded thru iTunes, can she get it back by downloading it again? Is there a record of these songs kept with iTunes?

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Answer 7

QuickDraw

Level 3

704 points

Oct 15, 2009 5:51 PM in response to Ibis Ghost

I'm pretty sure that any music and/or movies that you loose/delete are not downloadable again unless you pay for them again. I back all my stuff up like clockwork at least once a week.

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