I have 10,672 duplicated song in my iTunes Library. Surely there is an easier & automatic way of deleted duplicates while keeping a version without individually manually selecting each song?

Hello Gavstar,

You can quickly delete duplicates within iTunes by changing the view to Songs and make sure to add the category for date added. Organize by the data added and you should be able to make a quick selection of the duplicate songs by clicking on one of them, holding shift, scroll down to the last duplicate and then hit delete.

Find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201812

Using the new iTunes

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203128

Regards,

-Norm G.

Tell us why the method outlines won't work. If all your duplicates were created on May 3, 2015 then all you need to is sort by date, select all in the range of May 3, 2015 and delete those. If you have problems selecting a range of items in iTunes then you need to tell us that.

Remember there are different kinds of duplicates and they need to be handled differently.

How to find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2905

Posts by turingtest2 about different types of duplicates and techniques - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3555601 and https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3293239?answerId=16042406022#16042406022 (Note: The DeDuper script is for Windows).

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=scanfordoubleentries

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/dupin.php (commercial) There are other similar tools, particularly a much earlier version of this package called "Corral iTunes Duplicates", which I am sure a general web search would reveal.

The best way to deal with this is to avoid it in the first place. I create one duplicate per year with 12+ years of using iTunes so review your methods.

Sorry, I have an old computer and slow connection so I almost never watch online videos unless I want to spend 5 minutes doing so for a 60 second video.

You can sort by whatever criteria you wish. If they really are scattered about with no common feature you may well have to do it all manually. If it were me I would be too worried about things being removed that are not truly duplicates and would prefer to do it by hand. I would say your best bet is to check out Dupin.

Gavstar, I'm not sure how much this will help, but there's an Applescript utility to automate some of the process of finding and removing duplicate tracks:

http://dougscripts.com/apps/dupinapp.php

Yes, that is the "Dupin" to which I referred in my last post, and to which I provided a link in a post previous to that. Hopefully the OP has resolved this in the past 3 months since the last post. 😉

Sorry, Limnos. Don't know how I managed not to see that.

I have had this same problem for years, especially for voice memos which multiply like rabbits. It's absurd that Apple provides no way to deal with large numbers of duplicates in a simple way. Gavstar is totally right. Anyone who suggests a manual solution is missing the point. It should be as simple as pushing one button to get rid of all duplicates on iTunes on every device. SOS to Apple--help us out on this.

I'm interested here, are people saying the duplicates are the same song in different albums, like in a greatest hits as well as the original album, or are they exactly the same song and album.

I have 12.5k songs in my library and since I started using iTunes back in the early 2000's I have never had the need to de-duplicate. I am curious as to how this situation occurs

Genuine duplicates (i.e., excluding different recordings of the same song) happen when people add media to their library more than once. My experience is the same as yours - more than 10 years of using iTunes, main library with 88k songs, never once seen a duplicate except as the result of occasional dumb-user error on my part.

Ok, thanks for that.

I agree this doesn't come up too often for albums. The main problem is a bug that duplicates voice memos recorded on the iphone. You can find many people complaining about this in various places online. The solution that some people suggest is to stop syncing voice memos to itunes from your iphone. But then you don't have backups of your latest voice memos, unless you use icloud. But many people don't want to use icloud for various legitimate reasons. The best solution by far would be for Apple to fix this bug that has been duplicating voice memos on everyone's computer for years. If I am missing something, please do share your wisdom.