vickifromcb
Level 1 (0 points)

Q: Help!  I need to discard "double" songs in my library.

Is there any way to do this without checking each one individually?  There used to be a way that you could ask itunes to show you all your repeated songs.

MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2014), iOS 9.2.1

Posted on Jan 21, 2016 9:26 AM

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vickifromcb

Q: Help!  I need to discard "double" songs in my library.

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  • by welshcatholic,

    welshcatholic welshcatholic Jan 21, 2016 10:12 AM in response to vickifromcb
    Level 2 (237 points)
    Jan 21, 2016 10:12 AM in response to vickifromcb

    Have a look at this article

     

    http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-software/tidy-up-itunes-by-removing-duplica te-songs-3528623/

  • by rockmyplimsoul,

    rockmyplimsoul rockmyplimsoul Jan 21, 2016 10:15 AM in response to vickifromcb
    Level 5 (7,131 points)
    iTunes
    Jan 21, 2016 10:15 AM in response to vickifromcb

    vickifromcb wrote:

     

    There used to be a way that you could ask itunes to show you all your repeated songs.

    There still is, see:

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

     

    Note that there are "Show Duplicates" and "Show Exact Duplicates" options (hold the Opt key for the Exact option).  "Show Duplicates" will include results that are not truly duplicates, e.g. a studio vs. live album.  The Exact option matches song name, artist name, album name, and track number to ensure that the songs truly are duplicates.

     

    Once you get the results you do have to manually pick and choose which to delete, that's always been the case (as it should be, I wouldn't want some automated process to delete things I don't want deleted).  What you can do, if you have duplicates, is to show the "Date Added" field so that the results can be traced to something that may have happened on a particular date.  What I've done before is sort the duplicate results by Date Added, selected all by a particular recurring date, then re-sort the results by song name to see if the pattern is such that all duplicates are from that particular date.  Not sure if that makes sense, but take a look and you may see what I mean.