Deleting iTunes Duplicates Manually.
If you are you tired of starting up your iPod and the playlist plays the same song over and over caused by duplicate iTunes files. The following tips will help.
If the only problem you have is duplicate tracks in iTunes and not necessarily duplicated files on the hard disk, the solution is to use the built in iTunes Duplicates finder feature, to find and remove the duplicates. There are also some scripts you can find online to perform this task. This can be very useful especially if you need to synchronize across multiple machines and or platforms.
If the actual files on the hard disk are ones that are duplicated , then the solution is tiring, long and requires a lot of disk space. This is because of the different folder and file names involved.
The manual solution includes the following steps:
ñ Use iTunes Find Duplicates feature to find and remove any duplicate tracks this will not affect your drive.
ñ Select every track in your iTunes Library and drag them from iTunes to a new Folder of your choosing on the disk drive.
ñ This is going to copy your entire library without any of the duplicates.
ñ Select and delete all the tracks in the iTunes library on your drive
ñ Next move the files of the new folder to your Library folder and drop it back into iTunes, or show iTunes where you moved your Library.
The steps above should rid your iTunes of any duplicates.
Some other solutions include software like iDupe which costs around 8 dollars. It apparently looks at your media library with a more thorough approach than what Apple bundles in iTunes. It has way more settings than the iTunes duplicate searcher but even with the default option it does a very good job.
The user has options to choose to delete duplicates from a currently selected Playlist, from the Library as whole, and also from the hard disk. According to its documentation, it works best with chunks of not more that 2000 tracks in a playlist. It might not delete the files quickly but it gets the job done very well.
The Show Duplicates feature on iTunes accessed via >> File >> Show Duplicates works by guessing files that appear to be the same. It will often show two songs that are similar in naming or artist but not necessarily the same for example a live version as opposed to an album version. This is the reason this feature cant be used as magic fix my library button.
The next step you will click the Check All button if you are satisfied that all the duplicate items have been selected, and then click on Delete Checked Files to remove them. To confirm action click on the yes button. The application sends all the duplicate files to the Recycle Bin. The remaining step is to tell iTunes to search itself then remove any missing items in the library. Though there is no simple way in the iTunes interface to do this, you can download a script from Apple to do this.
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