Duplicate Track Numbers in an Album

Question

Duplicate Track Numbers in an Album

A large number of my albums when opened in iTunes for Windows will have duplicate tracks. Two Track 1s then two Track 2s and so on. Then there are other albums that are normal.

When I inspect the album in Windows Explorer, there is only one track for each song.

I am running iTunes for Windows, Version 12.9.2.6.

I could manually go through all of my albums and delete the extra tracks through the iTunes app, but I have around 20,000 songs in my library.

Is this a Library error? When I open iTunes it seems to take a fairly long time for the app to recognize the library, even though there hasn't been any changes to it since the last time it was opened.

If I were to manually copy my "Music" folder to an external drive, then delete the files on my hard drive and then re-import the music into iTunes, would that correct these "dual tracks?"

Will iTunes immediately and automatically find the music for my extensive playlists?

My Playlists seem to find the songs correctly even though iTunes shows duplicate tracks. This is more of a nuisance than anything since if I play the album it only plays one of the duplicate tracks instead of playing each song twice.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Posted on Jan 9, 2019 7:43 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

turingtest2

Level 10

278,263 points

Jan 10, 2019 7:31 AM in response to windyhillsphotography

If these are purchased items, and one of the tracks of each pair has a cloud download symbol then try signing out of the iTunes store and back in again to resolve.

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

Reply

Duplicate Track Numbers in an Album

Similar questions