Getting rid of duplicate tracks in your music library?

If you are using I Tunes, than likely no. Sorry.

Wow, I didn’t know there was a “show duplicates” option… shit.

@ChaosCross I’m willing to use something else to get it all tidied up, I can always then import the cleaned folder into a fresh new iTunes, is there anything you could suggest?

Hold down the “Shift’ key and then right click on the song and then ‘delete’. You will see the message “Are you sure you want to remove the selected song from your iTunes library?” Click ‘remove’.

You will then get a secondary message which says “Do you want to move the selected song to the recycle bin or keep it in the iTunes media folder?” Click “move to recycle bin” and it will completely take it out of your iTunes library.

@Bluefreedom I’m aware that it can be done that way, I’m looking for a less manual way to do it. It’s a big folder and I have a feeling that maybe a third of it will be duplicates.

@RareDenver. Sorry, I thought my description was different than the way you described in your details. I guess I don’t know any other way than that either. =(

@RareDenver You could select all the duplicate files (those you want to delete) and then change the artist of all those songs to zzz (for example). Then go to your folder and chose “keep arranged by” -> “date modified”. All the songs you want to delete should be on top of the folder now.

I do this by deleting the entire album from iTunes (not the actual files) and then re-import.
I think if you have duplicates of the files, you have to delete them manually. At least that’s what I had to do.

@bvdshec17 not sure that would work as it would just move the folders with those files to the top and some of the folders have the files i want to keep too example

@RareDenver Oh so you have lots of different folders.. Sorry then. That’s the way I do it because I have one single folder with all my 12,000 songs

@bvdshec17 no my iTunes folder is then broken down into artist folders and then album folders etc

so here’s the thing… once you have any music in your itunes you will have 2 copies of each file.

so… the quickest way to get rid of the duplicates on your HD is to convert the library to AAC then in your explorer or finder search for MP3 and delete them all. you still keep your entire library.. just in AAC which has the same sound quality but takes up half the space and you won’t have the extras on your HD.

another thing you can do is to search for mp3 and see what root folder they are in… one will be the itunes folder… the other folder you can erase and be done.

Hope this helps.

How many duplicates do you have that you need such an efficient way to be rid of them?

@PacificToast at an estimate about 3500

@RareDenver OAO I apologize, I thought it would be about 8. Sorry I cannot help.

@PacificToast nice. lol

@PacificToast it’s just finished importing the last folder and it has 27759 tracks now, I’m guessing about a third will be duplicates :-(

Go to the root directory in your Windows explores. Search for *.mp3

Sort result by file size. If your collection isn’t too big and you don’t have identical songs with different bitrates duplicates should be next to each other.