How to clean up duplicate songs in your iTunes library with freeware

How to clean up duplicate songs in your iTunes library with freeware
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Clean up duplicates in your iTunes library with freeware

This article is for everyone out there who needs to clean up the duplicates that are plaguing their iTunes library. Before you think of this as a chore let me assure you that it is something that is essential — much like spring cleaning your closet come summer. There are some other things that you can do to keep your iTunes album in excellent shape like add album cover art as well as make sure that the album information is complete but if you haven’t done things like this in the past then what you will end up with is a slightly incomplete album compared to the many problems that come up when you have an album that is filled with duplicate songs.

Isn’t two better than one?

itunes-duplicates

Not when it comes to duplicates! The biggest issue with duplicate songs is that you will have to find a way to find the song that you want amidst a number of hits for the same result. Suppose you search for Long Long Way To Go by Def Leppard and end up with 4 results instead of one. While in that moment you will be alright with picking one and playing it over time the stats for the song will be messed up. Not only will the listen counts will be off, you will also end up with a playlist that has the same song rated at different levels multiple times. This makes it extremely difficult to sort out your listening tastes over time.

If you’re like me and open up the iTunes browser to find music by specific artists you’re going to end up listening to the same songs over and over again. It’d be much easier to set iTunes to repeat the song, right?

You’ll also save a lot of space since even 100 duplicate songs can waste close to 1 GB of space.

Genius isn’t so smart

The new Genius feature in iTunes playlists will begin to falter if you have duplicates as the songs that you are listening to will have duplicate play counts and different ratings. The algorithm doesn’t lump together the data from multiple versions of the same song so the the predictions that it chucks out to help improve your listening experience and broaden the scope of your music library will be completely off at best.

What to click to see duplicates in iTunes

show duplicates

iTunes has a duplicate song checker built in!

iTunes has a duplicate checker built in. Click on File and then on Display Duplicates which will let you see all the duplicate songs together. Sort the list by Name and get ready to spend a few minutes manually deleting all the duplicates that are present.

Corral All Dupes — Clean duplicated with ease

Doug’s duplicate scripts are one of the easiest ways to do the above automatically. The Corral All Dupes scripts are great at helping you remove duplicates pretty quickly. Head over to the website and give them a quick spin. You’ll be amazed.