Have you ever been browsing your iPhone or iPod and noticed you had a lot of duplicated songs? Do you want to know how to remove iTunes duplicates the easy way?
I recently went through my CD collection and uploaded it to iTunes. Now, I already had a lot of hand-picked tunes in my library, and perhaps that was part of the problem, because I ended up with about 30 or 40 duplicated songs spread throughout my collection.
Here's the easy way to spot and remove iTunes duplicates:
- Open iTunes
- Click on the Music category of your Library
- Choose File -> Show Duplicates
- You'll now have a list of all duplicates in your collection. Simply click on the duplicate and either right click and hit delete or press the delete key on your keyboard. Make sure the duplicate isn't valid, such as a live or alternative version of the song.
- When you are done, choose File -> Show All to switch the view back to showing your whole collection
These steps will also works on Movies, TV Shows and the rest of your iTunes library.
Have too many duplicates to go through them manually? There are also a few applications that will help out such as iTunes Dupes Barrier and iDupe.
Want to learn more about the iPhone? Check out the iPhone Guide.
iPhone help:
How to save iPhone battery life
How to enable parental controls on the iPhone
How to snap an iPhone screenshot
iPhone apps:
14 must-have iPhone apps
Best free trivia games for the iPhone
TweetDeck: Is the best iPhone Twitter client a free app?
Comments
Yeah, that's fine for a handful of songs, but what about 100s or 1000s of songs? I don't feel like spending an afternoon (or all day even) scrolling through my entire library for dupes. One click removal would be nice, Apple!
>Yeah, that's fine for a handful of songs, but what about 100s or 1000s of >songs? I don't feel like spending an afternoon (or all day even) scrolling >through my entire library for dupes. One click removal would be nice, Apple!
You can try Tidy Up! (it is the same author of iTunes Dupes Barrier). It automatically divides the found items and works also with iPhoto, Aperture, Mail and any mounted disk.
You can also download mdeldupfile for thousands of records. Platform independent. No software needed to run or download.
mdeldupfile at mdecks.com
As usual author gives no real solution except to buy software to do the job. I have thousands of songs but dont want to spend the money to get it done, I thought someone out there could figure a way through itunes and Duplicates to remove them all.
I also used mdeldupfile, easy and free to try.
goto mdecks and type click on the mDelDupFile link
Hi Daniel
Deleting duplicates the way you outlined is fine but it is very time consuming. Also I believe it isn't possible to identify duplicates which are incorrectly labelled or have missing information. For instance you have one track called 'track one" one called 'billy gene' and one called ''billy jean''. They are actually 3 versions of the same song from the same album. However this method would not identify that. There is a great little programme that can identify duplicates even if they are mislabelled or misspelled. I review it here: http://www.organize-itunes.com.
Thanks Daniel for a great website.
Kind regards
Tom
Got something to say?
Examiner.com is looking for writers, photographers, and videographers to join the fastest growing group of local insiders. If you are interested in growing your online rep apply to be an Examiner today!