Comments on: Remove Duplicate Songs from iTunes

By: Nigel Horne

Nigel Horne — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:30:01 +0000

“Display Duplicates” is greyed out. Your tip doesn’t say how to enable it.

By: Legna

Legna — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:26:22 +0000

iTunes shouldn’t create duplicates to begin with. I hate iTunes for it’s constant maintenance requirement. The duplicate finder stinks. There needs to be stability in iTunes to guard against duplicates or moving libraries without my permission. There needs to be a duplicate remover that does not require manual selection of each duplicate file. iTunes, you are ridiculous for not responding to a BIG BUG and major complaint of many users. This is what happens when there is no competition — arrogance.

By: Laurens

Laurens — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:26:48 +0000

The duplicates finder is useless. It may find the duplicates but does not discriminate about quality, nor does it allow you to delete the duplicates without identifying each and every tune you want to delete.
I recently transferred my music and was left with over 3000 duplicates….. To identify these items entails many hours of work and there is no guarantee that adding more songs will not undo the work

By: MaryJane

MaryJane — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:30:03 +0000

My iTunes library is of considerable size and the only Duplicate function in iTunes is useful for is for identifying duplicates.

Getting rid of them, however is another thing! I have spent a month deleting each of my 8,000 + files (one by one) identified by iTunes as duplicates and am still not even half-way through. I need a better way to do that.

I tried fdupes without success, but it seems to be only for Mac. Any suggestions for Windows (preferably free)?

By: fdupes-rocks

fdupes-rocks — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 04:04:48 +0000

use fdupes first. It will check using md5 hash for exact duplicates.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 11:59:32 +0000

Hi,

I use windows xp (not that it shuld make a difference) but no matter what I am trying, I juat cant highlight the display duplicates tab from the file menu.

Help please? I am sure its a simple solution.

By: JaimesBeam

JaimesBeam — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:41:13 +0000

I don’t think any of the iTunes cleanup apps, or iTunes, does a good job of cleaning up duplicates.

I think it’s doable, but I think most of them take the wrong approach. The most simple attribute of a duplicate that will allways be there is the track length. That will give you the first cut at finding duplicates. The next thing it to loook at similarities in track, album, artist label fields. Third way is to look at what it matches in GraceNote. Fourth is to look at the apps that will identify a song by listening to it.

I find simply looking at the track length works as well as many of the complex apps. I wish there was an app that included this criteria in it’s algorithm.

Then there is the question of what is a dupe. Is two tracks that differ only in the sample bps a dupe? I would say yes, and keep the one closest to a target bps. Are two tracks that essentially differ only in one being a few seconds longer a dupe? Yes. Are two tracks that are from different albums but are essentially the same a dupe? Maybe… I would say yes, and would like to only store one copy with pointers to/from both albums so there is a record that the song is one both albums. I like to keep complete discographies, but hate keeping dupes.

Then there are the songs libs you get from friends that either have most of the track, album, artist info missing, or have all the info crammed into the track title, or God Forbid, into the file name!!! Most or these are from Windoze systems… need we say more?

Jim.

By: freddy

freddy — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:24:34 +0000

I followed the instructions mentioned above, i had previously tried deleting one by one, which turned out to be a nightmare. ( “so these duplicates also take up space on the hard drive?”) If they do, im glad to get rid of the because i had up to five duplicates in some cases. Works great I dont care if I had to sacrifice some songs compared to my library.

By: Toy Needle

Toy Needle — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 21:55:10 +0000

Well I tried Dupin, mentioned above, and it worked fabulously.

By: Kurt

Kurt — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:15:16 +0000

I have moved a hard drive from a network connection to my MacBook and everything that was on the original network connection is “dead”. Am i going to have to go song by song to delete these? I have thousands.

By: havvacuppa

havvacuppa — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:17:01 +0000

Ive got 200 songs duplicated…ive really got to sit there deleting EVERY SINGLE ONE???

What’s even more annoying is that itunes USED TO have this function, but for whatever reason, Apple decided to remove it.

By: JohnC

JohnC — Sun, 30 May 2010 16:41:06 +0000

This works in windows as well.
Ctrl+Shift then File..

By: garfield

garfield — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:29:39 +0000

how to remove duplicate songs from iphone it self.

By: forumsevdam

forumsevdam — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:29:07 +0000

AFAIK, this command also cares nothing about what’s been added to what playlists, or whether artwork, comments or lyrics have been attached. No attempt is made to reconcile all this when you delete a “duplicate” in this manner.

By: Shawn Koppenhoefer (DrKDev on Twitter)

Shawn Koppenhoefer (DrKDev on Twitter) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:22:33 +0000

The above tip is helpful, but you still have to examine every track to determine whether you want to keep or delete the tracks it finds and Smart Playlists aren’t perfect either.

I suggest you go read Doug’s Applescript solution to this.
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/dupin.php

Write your successes (or failures) back here!
/shawn