iPod lots of song dups

[ovlovturbo]

hi All

i have lots of song dups on my library, and i suppose they are in my main misoc file, and i was weondering what is the best way to get rid of them without getting rid of all of them?

hope this makes sense

thanks

Nik

 

[mad jew]

There's a Show Duplicate Songs option in the Edit menu of iTunes. You could go through them manually.

 

[Doctor Q]

If you select your entire Library in the Source list at the left of the iTunes window, you can use menu choice Edit -> Show Duplicate Songs to identify all of the duplicates in your library.

Then you can choose which, if any, to delete.

 

[ovlovturbo]

hi

thanks for the replies, i have done this, but i have like 5000 dups! i dont understsand whay this has happened,and i want to know an easy way to get rid of the dups, otherwise it will take me forever to get rid of them. it seems like i have dups in the main itunes music file, so i am not sure what i should do.

thanks

Nik

 

[mad jew]

There are a few scripts on Doug's AppleScripts page that may help. Search for duplicate and decide which one suits you the most.

 

[iSaint]

Did you change the song format or bitrate of your library recently? I tried one of Doug's Applescripts in an attempt to change my bitrate, then delete the original file. It didn't work for me...the delete part.

 

[ovlovturbo]

not sure what has happened with my library, and the main file, but there are triples and qudruples of songs, it is a big nightmare, and i want to get it sorted out as easily as possible. i never changed the bit rate on any of them, so i am not sure what is going on here

thanks for the help so far

Nik

 

[Doctor Q]

I suggest a little experiment. Pick a song that you have three copies of. Select each song, one at a time, in your Library listing and use menu choice File -> Show Song File (or command-R) to display the folder that holds the actual music data. Note the full path to the folder.

What do you get? Is there only one song file in one folder? Are there three song files in one folder? Are there three song files in three folders?

This will not only confirm whether you really have three copies of the music, but also might give us a clue how it got that way.

One other question. In iTunes -> Preferences, on the Advanced tab, do you have "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" and "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" checked or unchecked?

 

[ovlovturbo]

okay so i did the file search and it appears that there is three of the same song in the ffolder, it has the folder with the name of the album, then the songs are in there and there are dups in that folder, as for itunes, i have the two checled.

thanks again

Nik

 

[milo]

I suggest a little experiment. Pick a song that you have three copies of. Select each song, one at a time, in your Library listing and use menu choice File -> Show Song File (or command-R) to display the folder that holds the actual music data. Note the full path to the folder.

What do you get? Is there only one song file in one folder? Are there three song files in one folder? Are there three song files in three folders?

This will not only confirm whether you really have three copies of the music, but also might give us a clue how it got that way.

One other question. In iTunes -> Preferences, on the Advanced tab, do you have "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" and "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" checked or unchecked?

This is a serious flaw in itunes. If you drag in an audio file that's already in itunes, it will show up twice in the list. iTunes should be able to tell if it's already in the library and not add a duplicate listing.

 

[Doctor Q]

It sounds like you somehow imported your music more than once, and iTunes failed to detect the duplicates. Perhaps somebody has already written a script to clean up in such a situation (I don't know of one), but here are two other ways you could handle it:

1. If you are sure where all your music came from in the first place, and have copies of the music outside of iTunes, you could delete your entire song collection in the iTunes Library and then reimport the songs into iTunes by dragging one or more folders of songs from outside iTunes into the iTunes window.

2. In the display of duplicate songs in your Library, with the songs sorted by Name so duplicates appear together, select and delete all but one copy of each song. It's not hard, but that's 5000 little operations to perform by hand.

As with all major operations on your data, it is wise to make a backup copy of your disk files before running a script or taking steps like these.