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lsawtell

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 22, 2010
9
0
I have some old music in an 'iTunes Music Folder' on an external HD. Wanting to transfer my new music to the same folder, I don't get an option to 'overwrite duplicate songs'. How can I do this so I don't have duplicates of around 60GBs of music? Thanks!
 
I have some old music in an 'iTunes Music Folder' on an external HD. Wanting to transfer my new music to the same folder, I don't get an option to 'overwrite duplicate songs'. How can I do this so I don't have duplicates of around 60GBs of music? Thanks!
If you add files to your library that are in a different file path, iTunes will create duplicates. You may want to check out Dupin from Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes, which is a great resource for managing your iTunes tags and files.

However, there are reasons why you may want to keep some duplicates. iTunes considers items duplicates if the song name and artist fields match. They may be from different albums, have different lengths or bitrates, be different file types, be live or studio versions, etc. There is no software that can make all those determinations for you. The safest method of dupe deletion is manual. With any other method, you run the risk of deleting something you didn't intend to delete.
 
This is not an efficient way, and consider it at your own risk.

If the duplicates are the same files, then it might work fine.
Check that you have these settings enabled:
Keep iTunes Media Folder organized [enabled]
Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library [enabled]

Copy all 'new' music to the current iTunes Library, then within iTunes, in the File Menu choose Display duplicates, and then delete the duplicates.
 
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