How to automatically purge duplicates in iTunes library

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Level 1

19 points

How to automatically purge duplicates in iTunes library

Not sure what happened, but my iTunes library on my computer has 3-7 of each song. Seems like in most if not all scenarios, one has the cloud with down arrow, then the others are clouds with a line over them which say error if you put your mouse over them.

I figured out how to have iTunes shows me all the duplicates, but it seems like i have to go one by one to pick the errors and delete, but that's a few thousand files. There has to be a quicker way to do this, right?

Posted on Dec 15, 2017 12:10 PM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

272,749 points

Dec 15, 2017 12:20 PM in response to rjo98

Sign out of the store. See Re: Duplicate songs. Sign back in again after you've cleaned up and you shouldn't get any cloud duplicates. I think I have two or three that the iTunes store still shows in the cloud when they're downloaded, so I hide those from my purchase history.

tt2

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

272,749 points

Dec 15, 2017 1:24 PM in response to rjo98

See About iCloud Music Library icons and status - Apple Support for more details on their meaning. If you're using iTunes Match or Apple Music the icons can indicate content that is excluded from the iCloud Music Library. One reason for exclusion is that a track is a duplicate of another. Ideally you want rid of all duplicates before enabling either service.

tt2

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Answer 3

rjo98 Author

Level 1

19 points

Dec 15, 2017 1:09 PM in response to turingtest2

thanks tt2. One other thing I failed to mention, is it's just like this on one of my PCs and they all have some variation of the cloud icon, so i'm guessing this happened when i started using iCloud. Does that change your answer at all?

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Answer 4

rjo98 Author

Level 1

19 points

Dec 20, 2017 10:20 AM in response to turingtest2

Script didn't quite work out for me. It told me that I had 1,000 songs that weren't duplicated, and 3,000 which didn't exist (which are the dupes in the list with the different cloud icon). What I was hoping to do was get rid of those 3,000.

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Answer 5

rjo98 Author

Level 1

19 points

Dec 20, 2017 12:05 PM in response to turingtest2

Thought I did, but i was so busy reading the directions in the other thread, maybe I didn't. What i did do was sort by the cloud icon column, then all the ones that were in error, I just right clicked and removed from library. So far they haven't come back yet, so i'll see how that goes I guess.

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