More and more people are accumulating large iTunes libraries these days as they switch over to using digital music files rather than CDs. Your song library can quickly become unorganized, and you may end up with a bunch of duplicate songs by accident.
There is very simple way to find duplicate MP3 files in your iTunes library. This article will only discuss how to find duplicates in iTunes. If you would like more information on how to delete duplicate songs in iTunes, click here: Remove Duplicates iTunes.
I ended up with duplicates because I was adding songs onto a new computer from an external hard drive, and I did not have my songs organized well. I ended up adding some of them twice. I also had downloaded music from different places, so I had some overlaps.
If you have a big library, it could take a long time to figure out which songs are showing up twice. I started to go through my songs one by one but quickly realized that was going to take way too much time. I had only made it through the artists beginning with A and B before I gave up.
I started to think there must be a better way to go about finding all the duplicate songs, so I did a little research. It did not take me very long to figure out that there was a much easier way to find duplicate MP3 files in my iTunes library. I will now share what I found.
How to Find Duplicate MP3 Files in iTunes
Open up iTunes and go to the file menu. Select “display duplicates” from the menu.
There is also another option for people who have multiple versions of the same songs. This can happen if an artist puts out two versions of the same song, such as an acoustic or live version. To make it easier in this situation to figure out if you have duplicates of the exact same song, you can instead follow the instructions to display exact duplicates.
To display exact duplicates, go to the file menu, but this time hold down the Alt or Option key on a Mac or Shift key on Windows. You will notice that the “display duplicates” option changes over to “display exact duplicates” when you press the Alt/Option or Shift key.
And there you have it. A super easy way to find duplicate MP3 files in your iTunes library. Not everything having to do with computers has to be complicated. Once you find your duplicate songs, you can then sort them by clicking on the “date added” column so you have a better idea of which version you want to keep and which one you can delete.
