I've not looked at my music library for some time and was shocked to discover many dupes. I thought there was a "View, duplicates" in the drop down but it appears to have disappeared with the numerous OS changes.
I sure don't have time to manually scroll through thousands of songs so I hope there's something I'm overlooking!
Happy New Year!
Mac Pro
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 File > Library > Show Duplicate Items 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/trash.
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. 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.
Mac users can see Dupin or Dupin Lite at Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes for possible tools to deduplicate your library.
tt2
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 File > Library > Show Duplicate Items 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/trash.
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. 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.
Mac users can see Dupin or Dupin Lite at Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes for possible tools to deduplicate your library.
tt2
I thought there was a "View, duplicates" in the drop down
It's still there. It simply moved.
File > Library > Show Duplicate Items
Thank you for the insight. I ended up manually deleting them, some were same songs on different albums but most were duplicated on a specific date, which I think was the day I transferred my files to my new MacPro.
Thank you!
You're welcome. 🙂
tt2
Glad it all worked out.
Enjoy your Apple gear.
How delete duplicates in iTunes?
