iTunes adding songs twice

Do you mean the songs show up twice in iTunes, or they're in two places on your hard drive? If it's the first one I'm not sure why that would be happening, but if it's the second it might be the same thing that iTunes does with videos/movies: when you click 'add to library' the default action for iTunes is to copy the file into the iTunes library, leaving the original in its original location (so you have two instances of the file on your computer). You can turn off this behavior in the iTunes preferences, but deselecting 'Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library' under the 'Advanced' tab.

It's a glitch sometimes. Just delete the dupes.

In case it helps, there's 'Show Duplicates' function in iTunes, under the 'File' menu. It will list any pairs (or more) of songs that have the same name and artist. It will include legitimate duplicates though, like two different versions of the same song by the same artist (like a studio version and a live version), even though they may be on different albums, so be careful deleting.

I'm still curious why you're having this problem. I suspect there's an answer other than it just being a bug, but I could be wrong. I've used iTunes heavily, every version since 1.0, and have only had songs show up twice when I did something to cause iTunes to add them twice.

Come to think of it, are the duplicate versions the same type of file (e.g. MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF, etc.)? Might be that iTunes is converting the files and adding both versions for some reason. Not sure how/why that would happen -- just a thought.

i've had this issue too, though usually with just one or two albums. nowhere near on the scale that you have it. that really sucks.

you have to delete them manually. have it show duplicates, and delete every duplicate file from your collection. make sure that itunes is sending the files to the trash and not keeping the duplicated originals in the itunes folder.

playlist files?

I just swtiched to Mac, and noticed this was happening when I was copying folders from DVD's I had burned of my music. In my case, I think that iTunes was seeing the actual mp3's as well as the m3U playlist, and so was adding the files, and then adding the playlist as well. iTunes stopped doing this when I shift-drag highlighted just the songs... and did not double add anything in folders where there was no m3u playlist already.

I might be wrong, but I'd say there's a playlist in your folders.

-Cheers

Jarek

Duplicates in iTunes

OK - now that we have several reasons how it could be avoided - how do I get rid of the duplicates, triplicates, etc.? There are thousands of them, and doing it one at a time could take me forever. Is there a utility or setting that can do it automatically?

fraser1980 said:

After over a year of wanting, I finally took the plunge yesterday and bought myself a macbook.

I am still in the early stages of getting everything set up but have already come accross an issue. I imported 2 folders of music individually to my iTunes and each time it has added the songs twice leaving me to have to go and manually delete the duplicates.

What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions?

Click to expand...

Make sure there are no .m3u or playlist files in the folders you are adding.