Help... iTunes duplication driving me crazy

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Help... iTunes duplication driving me crazy

Can someone help please? I deal with small IT matters at work and have been trying to put my boss' music library onto a new pc with iTunes. (The library is on an external hard drive). I should perhaps say that the library is well over 100GB in size! The problem is that iTunes converts the different formats (there are wma, MP3 and MP4 files plus Apple formats) and when iTunes converts these to its own format it duplicates them. As you can imagine there are thousands to go through to pick out duplicates. I've tried iTunes Sweeper and unfortunately that doesn't really help because some songs on different albums are named the same, or if iTunes Sweeper cannot recognize the album it treats them as duplicates, and in any event, it still entails going through the huge list and checking the details of each. I've tried installing an earlier version of iTunes because it seems that only the later versions of iTunes do this conversion, but then I can't open the library because I get a message to say that it won't open with the earlier version because it was created with a later one. I've spent many hours trying to find a solution and have looked online. I can't even open the XML files to see a list of the songs and their formats: if I could, I was thinking I could list them by file type and take it from there. I put the library onto my pc using Windows Media Player which allowed me to see what the formats were (note that WMP didn't convert!). I've also tried changing input settings to MP3. I'd be so grateful if anyone could give me some help on this. I should perhaps say that we have Windows 10 pc's.

Windows 10

Posted on Oct 13, 2016 1:17 AM

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turingtest2

Level 10

278,263 points

Oct 13, 2016 5:57 AM in response to LesleyP100

iTunes may create duplicates if the same content is repeatedly added from outside the media folder when it is set to make copies of anything that is added to the library, or is added from an external drive that hosts the media folder that was offline when iTunes was launched, or you reimport a folder that contains .wma tracks and allow them to be converted.

Apple's official advice on duplicates is here: 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, or that sometimes the same file can be represented by multiple entries in the library and that deleting one and recycling the file will break any others.

Start in the Songs view. Use View > Show Duplicate Items (pre iTunes 12.4) or File > Library > Show Duplicate Items (post 12.4) and then click Same Album to display exact 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 (Windows only) 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 on the script, 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

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