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Finally!
Over the past weekend I downloaded the update to Apple’s iTunes software. It’s up to version 4.7 now. Whenever an update to anything is released, the questions are 1) What has changed? and 2) Is it advisable to update now?
For the 4.7 update, the answers are 1) Not very much; and 2) Immediately!
According to the release notes, this was a pretty minor release, with just two new items. The first is support for copying photos to an iPod photo. This would be necessary if I had an iPod Photo, but I don’t**. The second item is “the ability to show duplicate songs in your library”.
I don’t know about you, but I often end up with duplicate files in my iTunes library. Sometimes I’ll import a CD twice by accident. Other times I’ll add files from Limewire or some other source. Not too long ago, I merged external hard drive libraries with a buddy. In all these cases, and many others, it’s possible to have an album (or just song) in your library twice.
It always seemed like purging duplicates should have been part of the base iTunes functionality. It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard (the files have unique profiles — name, length, etc.
There were always kludgey ways to do it, but all very time consuming and labor intensive. Now, it’s a dedicated menu toggle (under Edit).
Thanks Apple, better late than never.
**I don’t have an iPod photoApple Store in San Francisco It seemed nice enough, though I have a little difficultly seeing how it would fit into my life, especially considering how awesome Flickr is.
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stefan January 11th, 2005 - 2:22 pm
Well.. it helps but it still doesn’t actually remove the duplicates for one. Unless yours has a feature mine doesn’t. With several thousand songs in the library it gets really tedious to manually remove each duplicate.
If they really are duplicates (same file format, same length) then perhaps the best option would be to move all the song files not in the iTunes Music library to the trash (though not delete). And if there is a duplicate in the Music library move that as well.
matt ventura January 25th, 2005 - 8:44 pm
dude. the duplicates in itunes drive me nuts!
funny finding your site here. going to whistler this weekend with tony. should be a good time.
aloha
matt v
Ryan Turner July 25th, 2005 - 4:01 am
iTunes just went to 4.9. And although like 4.7 it does show duplicate song.. Unfortunately… due (most likely) to user malfunction I am unable to delete the hundreds of duplicates that exist. Shift-delete or Delete - just clears the track from the library. But it still resides on disk. Am I missing something???
Robert Burns August 13th, 2005 - 8:41 pm
Hmmmm, You would think that a company as large as Apple would be able to put just some basic functionality into a product that costs as much as it does. I have just got an iPod Photo 60G and started to drop all my music down onto it. You guessed it - duplicates. Even after I used a nice little program called Doublekiller to get rid of the mp3 duplicates off my drive, iTunes still thinks they are there. The only method I can work out to get rid of them off the library list is to just do it manually. Nice one Apple! How about upgrading your software so we can actually use our iPods without so much grief. Good luck to all in the same boat.
Nate Koechley’s Blog » Blog Archive » I want change logs September 13th, 2005 - 11:08 pm
[…] As I’ve shown before, letting the users know what you’ve done is a great way for them to get excited about your products. […]
rei July 1st, 2006 - 3:46 pm
This blog is useless, it doesn’t say anything at all about deleting duplicates.
nick fox September 6th, 2006 - 3:36 pm
We’ll useless is a strong word here. I think we have acertained that itunes is awfull at managing large volumes of music files, and i think that is almost as helpfull as an itunes solution. because with IT its quite often easier to work around a problem than to fix it directly. keep all your music in a seperate folder and re-import when you need to.
Santiago November 28th, 2006 - 12:01 pm
I just got my 2000t and all of my songs are skipping in iTunes, and I cant figure out why. If someone could help me out and tell me how to fix this I would really appreciate it because its driving me crazy. Thanks for the replys.
Goosmr December 17th, 2006 - 2:32 pm
As far as deleting duplicates, your best bet is just to delete all of the files and just reload them all on, it screws up playlists, and playcounts, but it does get the job done. And ive heard a lot of complaints about the skipping in iTunes and i dont think it’s ur computer. Many people say that the new update (iTunes 7.0.1) has caused that to happen. As for me, I just reinstalled iTunes 6. There are some pretty helpful tips for this @http://blog.dominik.net/2006/09/23/reverting-to-itunes-6-windows/
It should explain how to do it. I hope this helps a little!
Vinnie December 21st, 2006 - 7:22 pm
I just googled ‘how to delete duplicate songs out of itunes’ and came across this website.
The bottom line is, Apple needs to scrap itunes completely and start writting a new program to use with our ipods because itunes fucking blows.
I consider myself pretty computer savy but always find myself pulling my hair out of my head when I’m using itunes. Something that should be so simple seems to always be a pain in the ass with this program.
Is there an alternative program to use with ipods? Because I’ve just about had it with this pos software.
Goosmr December 22nd, 2006 - 3:42 pm
I think winamp is a good media program. Uses a whole lot less memeory when using it too. But i havnt used it enough to be able to tell you how well it works with ipods, but it definitly does. Its a much more simple interface, and very costomizable so i hope it’s what ur looking for.
The Man January 5th, 2007 - 9:18 pm
Hey I just moved all of my music and videos from my C drive to my D drive (~24 gigs) because I had like 2 gigs left of space on my C drive. Now my iTunes has duplicates of all of my stuff, and I don’t want to just go through and select all of the missing ones because it would take a heck of a long time to click through 2700 songs without messing up. Does anyone know how to delete all the missing files on my iTunes without doing that?
Keith January 25th, 2007 - 11:33 pm
Dupe Eliminator works perfect for gettin’ rid of dupes. I have version 7.0 of iTunes and it still worked, even though it’s made for version 3.2.
Thank God, I had over 4200 duplicate songs, and now they are gone.
PS. I hear iDupe is great for you Mac users.
John May 3rd, 2007 - 8:54 pm
The main problem I see with ITunes is the fact that if you allow ITunes to ‘manage’ you music it will completely jack up your directory structure for its own assine structure. While it ‘updates’ your music and you happen to have multiple locations of music, ITunes with then ‘manage’ all the music into their respective folders(artists/album) and create another track of the same song with a number after it. So in essence you do have 2 tracks of the same song. (IE. song.mp3 is the same song as song1.mp3)
You would think by now with the number of IPods sold that Apple could figure out how code a program to work properly…
Stuart McHattie May 13th, 2007 - 4:07 am
Well I have to agree that iTunes on a PC is rubbish. That’s why you should consider purchasing Dopisp for Windows Media Player. I got a copy (30 day trial as well) and it lets Windows Media Player sync to your iPod …
WMP’s library is much more clever than the one in iTunes
iTunes on a Mac .. now that’s a whole different story. It’s a lot better on a Mac than it is on a PC.
Well anyway, that’s my 2 cents. Peace out
Stuart
Shatha June 4th, 2007 - 4:03 pm
Maybe this is their way of making people think that they need to “upgrade” to an iPod with more capacity. I wonder how many people think that they have as many songs as they can put on their iPods and go out and buy a “bigger” iPod, without realizing that their library is just full of duplicates and duplicates of duplicates.
G-force June 14th, 2007 - 8:25 am
I’m pretty sure the problem is that iTunes does not recognize .m3u -files in the album folders and first loads the playlist and then the files them selves, thus creating a mess of duplicates in your playlist. I can’t figure out what the Apple developers were thinking when adding a function for finding the duplicates but none for removing the extras?? What am I supposed to do with that?
And as an answer to Stuart McHattie: I have a mac and can tell you this! If I could find a single music player with some kind of functionality I would switch immediately. iTunes blows harder than a hooker on speed, even on the mac. Please, someone port WinAmp or Amarok before I loose my mind! No enqueue function in a music player? Wtf??
Mark September 12th, 2007 - 5:34 pm
Hey guys, came across this page with the same question. Decided there was not really any good solutions that I didn’t have to pay for..
So I wrote up a quick python script to do it for me:
http://chroot.net/~mark/remove_dups
Just copy that to a file on your osx home directory, open up a terminal type chmod +x remove_dups
usage is as follows:
./remove_dups /path/to/your/music/directory /path/to/backup/direcory
What I did was just go into itunes, select all my songs, hit delete (doesn’t delete from the disk).
./delete_dups /Volumes/disk1/Marks\ Music/ /Volumes/disk1/music.bak/
This moved all the duplicates to /Volumes/disk1/music.bak/
Went back into itunes and re-imported /Volumes/disk1/Marks\ Music/
Shaun February 16th, 2008 - 4:42 pm
I know this is an ooooooooooooooold thread, but if anyone out there only uses their ipod for music (farfetched in this day/age) i suggest MediaMonkey. The interface is not as intuitive as itunes, but the functionality so far surpasses it..
MM will not only reorganize your library database, it will relocate files based on tag. I moved files from multiple IDE/SATA drives/network drives to a single firewire drive with around seven clicks (and a long wait). When the process was done, I had a unified organizational scheme which I could reorganize at will. MM monitors folders, so if you set an import folder destination separate from your library you can import CDs and MP3s to HD, verify that they work, then import them to your library.
For now, mediamonkey only supports syncing music to ipod, but in order to get around this I just sync photos/video/whatever with itunes first (my music library in itunes is empty) and then close itunes, open mediamonkey and sync music.
I would rather use a single-step process, but I have not found one I like just yet.
my 2¢
steph April 5th, 2008 - 9:53 pm
so this is an old thread, and we know itunes sucks. Here’s how i did it.
i organized my “duplicates” so they showed me the date added. At least with my computer it had copied my library after the entire first copy was created. so i picked the first song, then clicked down till i found a repeat of it. then i deleted all the highlighted songs in one go. its a lot simpler then deleting them one by one. i had to do this about 5 times but it only took me about 10 minutes altogether, and really what’s 10 minutes?
my computer got rid of 1225 songs in less then 2 mins, so its not like deleting large somes of songs takes hours.
hope that helps
John B April 18th, 2008 - 10:10 pm
that was a great solution! i added the “date added” column and sorted by it. that put all the recently added duplicates in one section so i could use the click shift/click mode to select them all and delete. it didn’t get all of them but it saved me HOURS of doing it one by one!!! thanks!
lily May 5th, 2008 - 11:33 pm
Steph - you rock! That fixed my problem perfectly…and saved me ~$30. Thanks for sharing.
Quentin May 8th, 2008 - 10:20 am
Even neater solution:
http://www.paulmayne.org/archives/2007/11/how-to-remove-broken-or-dead-tracks-from-itunes/