iTunes Duplicate Song Problem

[xXdaveXx]

I recently attempted to intergrate an old music collection of mine with my current using iTunes. Like I had done before with other large directories of music, I simply dragged the folder onto the music linst and it automatically imported and organized the music. The problem is that I acceddentally did this twice.

Now I have 5GB of duplicate music taking up a huge amount of space on my hard drive, and I cannot manually remove the duplicate music because there is simply too much to do manually.

Anyone know of an automated means to delete duplicate music on my iTunes library? I know iTunes has a feature to detect and show duplicate music , but it lists both files to I cannot just select all and delete from that list.

[Darkshine]

http://www.applegeeks.com/sm/index.php/topic,5897.0.html

check there..maybe something someone said would help..and search man!

[lg_alucard]

of course you could always just "show duplicate songs" and delete all the doubles by hand

[Dae]

I have a similar sort of problem, so I'm just going to post it in this thread:

I dragged a whole bunch of songs over to iTunes once, and for some reason they doubled up (or I might have doubled up manually by accident... either way). I would go to "Show Duplicate Songs" and delete them by hand, but when I do go to "Show Duplicate" they don't appear. And if I delete one of the apparent duplicates in the "Library" window, both the 'original' and 'duplicate' disappear.

I can live with ignoring it. But I was just wondering if anyone had any explanations?

[DougofTheAbaci]

I have that happen too sometimes. When you dragged them across was there an .m3u file around? I'm not sure but logic would suggest it's some sort of database file and you end up double-importing.

[ojspires]

Sort the files by Date Added... If the Date Added column isn't visible, right-click on the title bar of the column and select 'Date Added' from the contextual menu that pops up.

[JCC]

Have a look at this topic too, someone recently had the exact same problem...

[craigeth]

here's an idea. create a smart playlist that contains all the songs from X band. then sort from the date added. it will put them in order from the most recent added date. just select all the songs in that date, (keep note of the time. you want to delete the most recent time, not just all those songs from that day) and then hit delete.

i havent read the threads what were linked on this page so someone might have already suggested this, but thats what i thought of when i read this thread.
hope that helps

[rudeboy.robbo]

Since this is the freshest thread on the subject in this forum I'll post it here.

I've been looking for similar solutions all day. I've created a 60 GB mess of duplicates after accidentally deleting and immediately THROWING AWAY away my entire music folder (yeah, I know, real smart) and subsequently recovering songs from every backup source disk I could find laying around.

Now, when I enable the show duplicates option in iTunes it shows I've got over 6000 duplicates! No way am I going to sit there and command-click 3000 individual items!

Haven't tried either of them yet but here's what I found to do the job so far:
Something called
iDupe at http://beam.to/woodenbrain
and
iSweep at http://www.davtri.com/index.py/software

The users at Versiontracker seem to like iDupe better than iSweep and it's cheaper too.

[Knightslugger]

if there is a difference between the two id3 tags, you should be able to sort them, such as import date, date crated, etc etc.  that way you wont have to cmd click anything, you'll be able to shift click it.

[morndry]

are all your songs in the "music" folder?  if they are all in one central location then this is easy to fix.

Quit itunes

Find the "library" file for itunes.

Throw it away

open itunes and drag the folder into the itunes window.

[imyourhuckleberry]

Does anyone know of a good multiple iTunes syncing/consolidating program or script?  I have an old iMac hard drive that has music on it and my Macbook that has music on it; with some of the same songs and I want to combine both libraries into one, without duplicates if possible.

[irwano]

Try iMDeduper:
http://www.imdeduper.com