Dealing With Duplicates in iTunes

I opened iTunes this morning when I got to work, and kept hearing the same song twice; I just upgraded to a unibody MacBook and ended up importing some songs twice in the migration. As much as I like Dave Brubeck and Amy Winehouse, I didn’t want to hear duplicates all day.

With about six thousand songs in my library, I didn’t want to go through one-by-one to remove all the duplicates. Thankfully, iTunes does have a feature that isolates duplicate songs. Unfortunately, though, there is a fair amount of manual labor involved.

When in iTunes, select “Show Duplicates” from the File menu, which will then reveal all the duplicates in your library. This will show you the songs with duplicate titles. If you’re like me, you’ll have several versions of the same song, so holding down the option button on your keyboard while in the File menu will reveal “Show Exact Duplicates.” This will show only files with identical titles AND identical lengths, file sizes, etc. This way, I didn’t lose each different version of these tunes.

Now that you’re showing duplicates or exact duplicates depending on your situation, you’ll need to manually go through the list and remove the duplicates by clicking on them, then pressing the delete key on your keyboard. iTunes will ask if you’re sure first, don’t worry.

This can get old quickly. A systemwide trick for selecting nonconsecutive multiple items in any window is to hold down the command key (yours may have an Apple on it) while clicking on the items. With all the duplicates highlighted, press Delete, and you’ll be left with a clean iTunes library. Don’t forget to check through the items now found in the trash to make sure you didn’t delete something you didn’t mean to. It’d be a good idea to let Time Machine back up your computer before hitting the delete key!