Delete Duplicates In iTunes
There are two ways to delete duplicates in iTunes, manually or automatically. I will go over both methods and help you figure out which one is best for you.
There are many reasons why duplicate songs accumulate in iTunes, and if you are reading this, chances are you have a lot of duplicates in your library. Many of us have been obtaining digital songs for nearly ten years now, and it can be hard to keep track of your music over the years.
You may not realize that you already have a song or album and end up adding music twice. Perhaps you imported the same CD twice by accident, or downloaded a CD from a file sharing site and then forgot about it and downloaded it again later on.
Another thing that can happen is you might copy music from a friend and not have time to go through and take out the stuff you already had. This happened to me and it was just a pain to have to try to sort through everything, so I ended up just adding a bunch of duplicates. I figured I could fix it later, but then I never got around to it.
Fortunately, there are ways to help you delete duplicates in iTunes. Although you cannot do it automatically within iTunes, there are third party software programs that do. If you want to do it all yourself without using a program, there is a little trick in iTunes that will make the process go a little bit faster.
Delete Duplicates In Itunes Manually
There is no quick way to remove duplicates from iTunes unless you use a third party software program, but there is one trick that you can use to help out. It is nothing complicated so anybody can do it.
First, go the File menu and select the option from the drop down menu that says “Display Duplicates.” This will show you all the songs that have the same artist and song title. Alternatively, you can show songs that have the same artist, song title, and album title if you think you have multiple versions of the same song.
To do that, you need to hold down the shift key if you are on a PC, or the alt/option key on a Mac. When you hold down that button and go the file menu, this time the option will now be to “Display Exact Duplicates.”
There is one more thing you can do to make sorting through the duplicates a little more efficient. You can sort the songs by the date they were added to your iTunes library by clicking the “Date Added” column at the top of your iTunes library. If you don’t see a “date added” column, make sure you are in list view. If you are not, go to the View menu and choose “as list.” Then you need to go to the View menu again and choose “View Options,” and make sure that you check off “Date Added.”
If you see that a bunch of duplicates were all added on the same day, you can delete them all at once by holding down the shift key as you select them. Then hit delete or go the Edit menu and choose “Delete.” Be sure to choose to move the original file to the trash, because you do not want to add it back into the library by accident again.
When you are choosing songs to delete, make sure to check the album column as well because you may have different versions of a song that were on two different albums. Perhaps one is a live or acoustic version.
It would also be a good idea to play each song to make sure that they are good versions and not corrupted in some way. Sometimes a song may be very quiet or it could cut off the beginning or end. You should play each one to determine which one is the better version, especially if they are different lengths. For example, if one is 3 minutes and the other is 2 minutes and 45 seconds, you should try to figure out if one got cut off or if they are just different versions.
Other things to look out for are in the meta data of the songs. If you right click the song or go the File menu and choose “Get Info,” you will see a bunch of information that could help you choose which duplicate to remove. The songs might appear to be duplicates, but they could be different. You can see what bit rate they were imported at, whether they have artwork attached, and what the file size is.
Another thing to watch out for can happen if you copy music from a friend. If they downloaded music from the iTunes music store, you would have to put in their iTunes password in order to be able to play the song. That is another reason you should play each song first before deciding which duplicate to delete.
When you are done deleting your duplicates, you can select “Display All” at the bottom of the iTunes window to see all your songs again.
Delete Duplicates In Itunes Automatically
It may seem like an easy enough thing to do, but when you try to delete duplicates in iTunes manually, it can take up a lot of time. I actually started doing it myself and only made through several hundred before giving up. Listening to each song and checking the meta data takes time, and if you have hundreds or thousands of duplicates, it can end up being days or weeks before you finish going through all of them.
Fortunately, there are programs that can do everything for you automatically. Literally all you have to do is push a button and they can do the entire project while you spend your time doing more important things. The program I use is called Rinse (formerly TidySongs), and I was very happy with it.
Not only does Rinse delete duplicates in iTunes, but it also does a bunch of other things to organize your music library. It will fix misspelled song information, add missing information, add album artwork, and organize your genres. The best thing is that it does not need your songs to be labeled correctly in order to work properly. It will fix everything up for you and completely organize your library.
You can try Rinse out for free to see if you like it by clicking on the picture below:
