TUAW Tip: Removing duplicate songs from iTunes

Have you ever been listening your iTunes library and wondered why a song played more than one time? Duplicate songs in your library can be very annoying, and waste precious space on your hard drive. In this TUAW Tip, I'm going to show you how to get rid of duplicates using a built-in feature in iTunes.

In iTunes, click the "Music" category under the Library section from the selector on the left. You should now see all of the music items that are in your iTunes library. Now click File > Show Duplicates. Any duplicate songs that are in your library will show up, and you will be able to delete the ones that you don't want any longer. To hide the duplicate song list, click the "Show All" button at the bottom of the window (or click File > Show All). You can use this same method for Music, Videos, and TV Shows. It will also work in any playlist.

Using the built-in iTunes feature is nice, but it can be very time consuming -- especially if you have thousands of songs, videos, or TV shows. In this case, you can use an application like iDupe (which costs $8US). iDupe gives you a ton of options for deleting duplicate songs in iTunes.

Do you know another way to delete duplicate iTunes songs? Know of another application to delete duplicates? Tell us in the comments!

Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 and TUAW Tips sections!

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Have you ever been listening your iTunes library and wondered why a song played more than one time? Duplicate songs in your library can be...

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trafficbob

To Norm about dupeGuru ME to remove duplicates from itunes - on a Vista Home Premium PC system..... Using it now and it's working great, the variables that I can use work great with live music downloads where you actually want to keep different versions. eg Phish, Dead and WSP. But is there a way around purchasing the product for a one time use - I have more than 1K duplicates because of the variety of storage devices used to download music on a new laptop - and the demo will only allow me to do 10 at a time ? Thanks for the info or any assistance in advance.....Anyone else had a similar problem and found a way around the cost ?? I love this forum as a first time user.

February 26 2009 at 10:32 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Stefan

I found that a great way to quickly, manually remove duplicates is to use spotlight to search for 1.mp3, 2.mpr etc. - and then pick the ones you are pretty sure are duplicates.
-Stefan

December 20 2008 at 6:51 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Josh

Can't believe no one has suggested the vastly superior Dupin:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/dupin.php

December 17 2008 at 6:25 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Roger Rabbi

Duplicate Music Files Finder

Works with Windows

December 15 2008 at 11:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

caricaturesbydave

http://www.hyperbolicsoftware.com/TidyUp.html

This is best of breed - ain't nothin' that comes close to what it does.
It's waaaaaaaaaay powerful and massively configureable.

Super cool for songs and images.

December 15 2008 at 11:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to caricaturesbydave's comment

Bert

Tidy Up is the best duplicate finder period. It does not care if names, dates, icons or resourceforks differ. If the actual file is the same, it will find it. Also with all your other files.

December 16 2008 at 9:09 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

nonsequitur

I actually want to keep my duplicates. :(

Only because I rip in lossless. I convert to 256 kbps AAC for my iphone.
Does anyone know of a good utility to manage these? perhaps to hide the 256kbps songs in itunes? it's a bitch to have two of a bunch of songs.

December 15 2008 at 8:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Norm

I use dupeGuru ME (the ME is for Music Edition) by Hardcoded Software (www.hardcoded.net). It's available for both Mac and PC and can search for duplicates based on filename, tags, or even file contents! Lots of settings to get things just right and definitely makes it easy to tame a large, unorganized music collection.

December 15 2008 at 5:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Galley

Don't forget that you can option-click to see "exact duplicates".

December 15 2008 at 4:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

3 replies to Galley's comment

Kenny

If you right click a song in iTunes it will show you what playlists that song belongs to.

December 15 2008 at 3:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

erick

hey guys somebody knows how to do it on the iPhone or iPod??

December 15 2008 at 2:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply