Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

FJR

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 21, 2008
204
0
So I managed to double all my music files in my iTunes library. Meaning that for all 9,873 songs in my library, iTunes shows two copies (although there is only actually one on my hard drive), both of which point to the same file. Is there an easy way to delete all the duplicates? From what I can tell, I have two options, A) delete my whole library and then reload it from an external hard drive or B) manually go through and delete all the duplicates.

I don't really want to do A unless absolutely necessary because it would delete all the play count and rating info and I don't want to do B because it'd probably take around 4+ hours.

I tried consolidating my library, but unfortunately that only adds files, it doesn't check your files and make sure that for every music file you have there is only one representation of it on the iTunes jukebox.
 

FJR

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 21, 2008
204
0
blah, just deleted the whole thing and added the folder back. I'm relatively certain that there wasn't an easier way. Looks like I'll be doing a lot of song rating for the next few months/years. Oh well.
 

mcnees288

macrumors newbie
Aug 20, 2008
10
0
this happens to me quite a bit. any reason for this? or is it just itunes being itunes.
 

crisss1205

macrumors 6502a
Oct 7, 2008
931
267
NYC
this happens to me quite a bit. any reason for this? or is it just itunes being itunes.
Uninstalling and then reinstalling iTunes can do this. And the same thing happened to me, m library went from 6,000 songs to 12,000 songs! And I deleted the duplicates the most easy way (listed above) and it took me about 3 months to delete all the duplicates! Hopefully Apple will make a new way of deleting duplicates soon.
 

Cinematographer

macrumors 6502a
Sep 12, 2005
900
4
far away
Usually the duplicates are all added to the library the same day. So if you order the songs by "date added" you get an easy way to delete the obsolete items in your library.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.