Deleting duplicate songs in i-tunes?

placeholder · 24 Nov 2008 at 18:07

Hi guys, looking for a bit of help with i-tunes.

I have about 60gb of music stored in i-tunes but due to not paying proper attention to what im doing i have some songs listed mulitple times, in some cases the songs dont actually exist more than once as the original source was my external Hard Disk which i have removed. Is there a quick way to remove the duplicates without having to sift through the entire library? I've selected "duplicates" from the drop down menu which is fine but i would still have to go through them all checking which is the actual song and which dont exist. I hope that makes sense! Obviously if i have to do it the long way then so be it but i just wondered if there was a quick way of doing it?

SentineL-X · 24 Nov 2008 at 18:29

I don't think there's a quick fix unfortunately...

If your music is already organised, delete the library and re-import it?

artaxerxes · 24 Nov 2008 at 18:52

select all tracks
right click and get info
set BPM (beats per minutes) to 1 for all tracks
(or some other field you dont use)
then add BPM column to the itunes interface (ctrl+j or apple+j)
sort by that column

the nonexistent tracks will not have a value
delete all the ones that don't have a 1

a few easy steps =)

iSam · 24 Nov 2008 at 19:54

Surely go to File > Show Duplicates and delete them?

Gman · 24 Nov 2008 at 19:56

iSam said:
Surely go to File > Show Duplicates and delete them?

naw doing that shows both the original and the duplicate.

iSam · 25 Nov 2008 at 00:48

Gman said:
naw doing that shows both the original and the duplicate.

Well just delete one of them?

Much easier than going through your whole library!

Bod · 25 Nov 2008 at 06:57

But he doesnt know which is the one that points to the correct file, and which points to the now non-existent duplicate.

TBH I don't think there's an easy way.
iTunes will recognise that the file doesnt exist when you try to play it so I suppose you can bring up the duplicates, click play on the first, then keep clicking next to go through them all, that will mark the ones that don't exist and you can cmd click them and remove

griffy · 25 Nov 2008 at 08:01

If your on a mac then download a program called Dupin, it will make it very easy to get rid of your duplicates!

artaxerxes · 25 Nov 2008 at 12:00

Do what I said. It tells you which files are non-existent. iTunes will not update the metadata of non-existent files. It will happily update the metadat of existing files. This removes all non-existent files in one process.

Hello - can anyone hear me?

=)

iSam · 25 Nov 2008 at 13:02

artaxerxes said:
Do what I said. It tells you which files are non-existent. iTunes will not update the metadata of non-existent files. It will happily update the metadat of existing files. This removes all non-existent files in one process.

Hello - can anyone hear me?

=)

Yes we can poppet, calm down.

meghatronic · 26 Nov 2008 at 22:18

I wrote a script in ruby to do just this... (scanned library folders) I'll try and dig it out.

placeholder · 27 Nov 2008 at 18:12

artaxerxes said:
Do what I said. It tells you which files are non-existent. iTunes will not update the metadata of non-existent files. It will happily update the metadat of existing files. This removes all non-existent files in one process.

Hello - can anyone hear me?

=)

Sorry its taken me so long to reply.

Yes that worked a treat, thanks for the tip! I was able to group all the non existing track and get rid of them. Its still left me with some that were actually on twice but thats a very small list by comparison. Thanks again!