Want to highlight a helpful answer? Upvote!
Did someone help you, or did an answer or User Tip resolve your issue? Upvote by selecting the upvote arrow. Your feedback helps others! Learn more about when to upvote >
Did someone help you, or did an answer or User Tip resolve your issue? Upvote by selecting the upvote arrow. Your feedback helps others! Learn more about when to upvote >
Windows 7 PC - My library has a complete set of exact duplicates (7500 files). Shift View gives a complete list. I have "unchecked" each duplicate and clicked "Done". Nothing happens and all files are displayed, including the "unchecked" files. The only way seems to be selecting individual duplicate and deleting them one at a time.
null-OTHER, Windows 7
In general you can select a range of tracks by clicking one, then holding shift as you click another. Ctrl+Click can be used to add or remove from the selection.
If the tracks you want to remove are all unchecked, and everything you want to keep is checked, you could create a smart playlist with the rule checked is false, then use Ctrl+A to select all items in the list and Shift+Delete to remove from the library.
However, depending upon just how the duplicates were created there remains the issue of whether you need to discard the underlying files, or just a set of duplicate entries. Get it wrong and you could be deleting the only copies of the tracks that you have, or you could clean up iTunes, but leave a whole load of clutter on the drive.
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
How can you delete exact duplicates as a group?
