deleting duplicates in iTunes

Apple's official advice is here... HT2905 - How to 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 playlist membership!)

Use Shift > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to display 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 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 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)

tt2

If you use the Show Exact Duplicates feature on a playlist you can delete all but one of the duplicates to leave one behind. The playlist stays intact but the particular songs no longer play twice or more in the list. If the play order matters then you may need to consider which duplicate you remove.

If you delete duplicates from your library, and one copy of a song was in Playlist A while a duplicate was in Playlist B then ordinarily one of the playlists will no longer contain the song. My DeDuper script fixes that as part of its functions.

On any given track you can right-click and use Show in playlist to see which playlists it is in.

DeDuper can be downloaded from the link in my first post. It aims to tidy up while automatically preserving playlist membership.

tt2

This is the link to the page with the DeDuper script. Scroll to the top for download and usage information.

If you delete songs from a playlist they remain in your library.

tt2

Yes. 🙂

tt2

You're welcome. 🙂

Tag on to any thread I've posted in and I should get to notice it... 😉

tt2

You cannot alter Date Added. You cannot alter Date Modified directly, it should correspond to the information held by the file system.

You can create smart playlists based on file types, e.g. Media Kind contains AAC, and run DeDuper on those, but a full clean-up should be run on the whole library. Generally you will want to keep the "best" copy of a track which my script takes as the largest, but it is possible to change a setting to keep the smaller file and in principle it would be possible to change the script to favour one format over another.

tt2