how to delete duplicate songs on itunes 10

Seeing duplicates has been emoved in the latest version of itunes. To delete duplicate items now you have to go thru and manually delete one by one

The show duplicates/show exact duplicates features have been left out of iTunes 11. Rumor suggests they will be restored in the next build. In the meantime I have written two Windows scripts to make playlists of Duplicates and Exact Duplicates, either from a selection of tracks or the entire library.

If you want to manually remove duplicate tracks use shift-delete to remove selected tracks from the library as well as the playlist. Keep one of each repeated group of files and don't send to the recycle bin unless you are sure that there are multiple files on the disc as opposed to multiple entries to the same file.

There is also my DeDuper script if you don't want to do it by hand. This can preserve ratings, play counts, playlist membership, etc. which are lost in a manual clean up. Please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping. See this thread for background on deduping and the script.

tt2

Hi TT2

I might have a teaser for you. I have commanded iTunes 10 to locate all my duplicates. It does not react correctly. For example, I have 3 versions of the same song on the hard drive but the duplicate is only displaying twice. (I am now wondering if there should be a command for Triplicates!!). It seems the duplicate will only display if there is an Album to accompany it. The third 'duplicate' which is just a song alone not related to an album does not display. For example, the song title is Calcium. The Artist is The Future Sound of London and the track is on the original album and the second song is on a compilation but the third duplicate, not showing, will not display because it was not loaded as part of an album. Any idea on how I can get all 3 tracks to show up in Duplicate View or even regular Music Library view?

Thanks

Duffo

Exact Duplicates need the same details if they are to be displayed. You may need to correct tracks with partial information, or just clean those by hand instead.

tt2

Sound to me like Duffo is not trying to use "Show Exact Duplicate Items" since two of the three albums have different names in his results (the Exact modifier requires the album and track # to be the same to qualify as being an exact duplicate).

Duffo, in the time since this thread was started, the utility to find duplicates has been added back to iTunes 11, no need to revert to iTunes 10 to find your duplicates. I just did some testing between identical songs, but one with no album name and that made no difference (came up fine as a duplicate). Perhaps iTunes 10 had a bug where a song had to have an album name, but that's not the issue with iTunes 11.0.4 anyway.

Indeed, the regular Show duplicate items feature should return all tracks where two or more tracks share exactly the same Name regardless of the values in other fields. I suspect an invisible difference such as a trailing space means that one of the expected items doesn't show.

tt2

Thank you. Interesting observation indeed. I am on iTunes 10 and I cannot seem to update to 11. Maybe because I am on OSX 10.5.8 (Ireland). I will just have to wait. ;-)

Thank you TT2 and Rock