how to delete massive amount of duplicate songs in itunes library

That approach is OK for a few tens of duplicates, but not if you have several thousand. It also doesn't address the process of deciding which files need to be deleted, and how to ensure that after the clean up operation you still have one copy of each group of repeated tracks.

tt2

Here's how you manually select MULTIPLE FILES to delete and just hit delete once.

Apple's official advice on duplicates is here... HT2905: How to find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library.

Use Shift > File> Library> Show Exact Duplicate Items to display duplicates.

Select a duplicate ..... hold down Control button as you continue to select more duplicates. once you've selected what you want to delete, hit delete!

Apple's official advice on duplicates 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 ratings and 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, 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

This looks great... Is it only for Windows? I'm on my mac but i can't seem to download the script, instead when i click on it i'm taken to the code...

Help much appreciated.

Windows only I'm afraid. Try Dupin or Dupin Lite from Doug's Scripts.

tt2

I have itunes on Windows. I follow a simple method. Click on Library -. Organize Library- . Select Consolidate option -. All songs wiil come in your itunes directory. Whenever the duplicate song is copied in itunes library it is copied with <<song name>> 1.mp3. Just search the folder with such filenames having 1 at the end and delete it. You are good. If you have 2 or more duplicates then the file name will be <<song name>> 2.mp3 and so on.Search and delete.

You then have to clean up the broken links in the library. It also won't help with logical duplicates, more than one entry in the database pointed at the same file, nor duplicates in different audio formats with different file extensions.

tt2

I have this question too. On an iMac running iTunes 12.5.1.21. When I select Option, File>Library>Show Exact Duplicates, it sometimes shows just one of a song. Is it showing me only the duplicate song which I can then delete, and not the original song? If it is not displaying only the duplicate, why is it showing me this song as a duplicate when there is only one copy of the song in my library? Other times it shows me songs with the same title but differing lengths of time and artists (classical music mostly does this). I am confused of which songs are duplicates that I can then delete.

Thanks much.

As a rule all duplicate copies are shown and it is up to you to choose which to keep and which to remove. If I recall I've occasionally seen a single track listed and I think it might be connected to purchases where the local copy is somehow matched with a cloud copy, but only one gets listed. I'd have to restore some hidden purchases to see if I can recreate it.

If you look at my posts in this thread you'll see that there are a number of different classes of duplicates that will be shown by iTunes duplicates feature. It will unfortunately miss duplicates where the audio content is actually the same but the metadata is different, and can mistakenly show duplicates when they are really different versions of the same track, or different tracks that have been given the same metadata in error. My Windows script makes a distinction between files that appear to be identical in both metadata and size and those that aren't, and cautions that extra care should be taken when deduping these.

tt2