How To Remove Duplicates in iTunes
If you are like most of us you must be having redundant music files in your iTunes library. Surely today’s computers come with practically endless disk space and having few duplicate tracks doesn’t make a difference but it counts when the music is on, let’s say, a portable USB thumb drive which has limited space. In that case, you would want to get rid of the duplicate music files if any to save the bytes of storage.
If we start by saying that iTunes is one of the best music players of all times, we think we will be doing a little injustice to it. Don’t get us wrong, we are not defying the point of it being one of the best but what we feel is that it ain’t just a music player, it’s a lot more.
Over the years, the majority of the complaints about Apple have centered around music. That’s because we love music, and Apple clearly doesn’t always think enough about people outside of its contrived all-in-on-Apple-Music listener when it comes to the iTunes experience.
Today’s complaint actually begins with a recent positive discovery. We finally gave in to the temptation and signed up for a free trial of Apple Music, and it’s really great. The recommendations it makes are often good, or at least not terrible, and we love being able to try out lots of artists that we otherwise would probably not have discovered. If you love downloading tracks on your phone after discovering them, and like listening to them even when you’re offline, you get that option. So far, so good. We definitely plan to remain a subscriber.
But then we ran into a bit of a snag when it came to the iCloud Music Library. This is the feature that syncs whatever you put on one device with all your iPhones, iPads, Macs, etc. In theory, it’s a great idea. If we discover a track on our iPhone and download it, it’ll be sitting on my Mac next time we might want to listen. And vice versa. On the iPad, we don’t auto-download these tracks, but they show up in the library for streaming if we want them. Perfect.
But after a couple of days of enjoying this new iCloud Library experience, we noticed a problem on the Mac. In iTunes, every track that is available on Apple Music but that we had acquired elsewhere (CD Rip, purchased from another store, etc) was doubled in our iTunes library. Each song would be listed twice, in other words.
Removing Duplicate in iTunes
iTunes has an inbuilt option to take care of your redundant media files. To start the process make sure you are on the music section of your Library with no filtering. Click on File –> Display Duplicates to display all the duplicate files in your library.
This method will display media files with the same name even though the track length may be different. To help you determine which item to keep and which to remove, it’s always a good idea to sort your duplicates by name, artist, time, release date, genre, and whatnot. Just click any column at the top to sort the items accordingly. You can reveal many more sorting options by right-clicking one of the columns at the top, such as Name, Artist, and so forth.
To find the exact duplicate hold down Shift Key while clicking on File and select Display Exact Duplicates to get the list of exact duplicate files.
You can now delete the duplicate media files from your library which will automatically delete them from all your synced devices. However, in the above method, you have to slog manually to remove each file and we need not tell you, how difficult it may become if you have a large music library. Also, the files you remove will only be removed from the library and not from your hard disk. If you want to overcome both these limitations then CopyTrans is what we recommend you use.
Remove duplicates songs in iTunes
We just discovered that Apple Music is finally able to recognize if a song has been previously added to a playlist and thought about sharing this with you. As soon as you attempt to add a track that’s already available in the Playlist you get a prompt that informs you about the situation. You have the options to continue and add the duplicate or to “skip” the addition and keep your playlist duplicate clean.
That’s a welcomed new feature introduced in iOS 13. We assume that we’re not the only one that had problems in the past with duplicate songs in the playlist, which can be annoying at some point. Yes, it’s a minor fix and yes it should have been available sooner. Competitors like Spotify and Google Play Music offer this feature for a long time. However, if you’re an Apple Music users we’re sure that you’re glad to hear about it.
How to remove duplicates in iTunes?
Have you built a music library in iTunes with duplicates of songs? That happens especially when you transfer your iTunes from Mac to Mac or PC to PC, so your library grows and takes too much space. But it is hard to find the duplicates in a library of thousands of songs — especially when you have the same song with two different formats — MP3 and AAC, or a song with multiple version (say one from the CD, and another from the live concert). It’s a time consuming job to find, compare and delete duplicate songs in iTunes library and local library on your computer.
It’s lucky that iTunes 11 has a built-in feature for identifying and showing duplicates. It’s easy to use iTunes to find and remove duplicate songs in your iTunes library, follow the steps below.
In iTunes 11, under View menu, choose Show Duplicate Items. Then all duplicate songs with the same name and artist will show up on the result window.
Select the ones you would like to remove and drag them to the trash.
If you have multiple versions of the same song (say version from different albums, or version from live or studio), you can show only exact song duplicates in iTunes. Hold the Alt or Option key (for Mac OS X) or the Shift key (for Windows) and choose View > Show Exact Duplicate Items. This will show you only duplicate songs having the same name, artist, and album.
If you are fond of music and you are used to applying iTunes to enjoy listening to them, you may have maintained an iTunes library that contains various music files from diverse sources. However, sometimes, you may get frustrated to find that there are duplicate audio files in your iTunes library. Hence, it is sensible for you to remove the duplicate files to make your iTunes library clean and organized.
In fact, you can use iTunes to remove duplicate files or resort to one effective iTunes duplicate remover to find and clear off iTunes duplicates. This tutorial will direct you to take a look at four wonderful methods to help you find duplicate files in iTunes and mass delete duplicates in iTunes.
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