Jake has a large iTunes library, and he wants to know if there’s an easy way to find duplicate songs. Luckily, iTunes has this feature built-in. Over time, it’s easy to build up duplicate MP3s. You’ll forget that you imported the same CD a year ago, then a friend gives you a mix that has several songs you already own, and before you know it, there are dozens of duplicates in your iTunes library. You could always buy an external hard drive, but if you want to save space with the one you already have, read on.
While this fix will take a few minutes of your time deciding whether the songs iTunes has found actually are duplicates, it’s well worth the time. Before we get to the duplicates, I want to cover one other area.
Getting All of Your Music in One Place
This step is completely optional, but if you’re sorting through duplicates, you might want to make sure all of your music is in your iTunes library. By default, when you import a CD or download music from places like the iTunes Store or Amazon, iTunes will add the music to your iTunes library. But if you have received music from some other source and added it to iTunes from a folder on your hard drive, the music might still be in that folder instead of your iTunes folder.
If you want to make sure all of your music is in your iTunes folder, you can consolidate your iTunes library. If you do this, iTunes will look at all of your music and move any music not in your iTunes folder into it. This means that if you want those files to stay where they are, don’t consolidate your library; but if you want them all in one place, this is a good option:
Finding Duplicates in iTunes
- First, open iTunes.
- Next, select Show Duplicates from the File menu (you must be in your music library to do this):
- Once you do this, iTunes will only show you the songs it believes are duplicates. How does it determine this? It looks for songs whose titles and artist names are identical or nearly identical. While this is a very good method, iTunes is assuming you have only one version of a song by each musician (meaning it doesn’t understand how to handle live albums with the same songs as are on studio albums or alternate takes of the same song).
- With your list of duplicates, you can start determining which files to delete. You’re going to want to sort the songs by Name (click on the name column at the top of the search results to sort alphabetically):
- As you can see above, I’ve circled two copies of a track called “Song Meat” by the band Subtle. It appears they both come from the same album and are the same length in time, so these two are definitely duplicates. The same could be said of the Sting songs, but not of the Miles Davis renditions of “Someday My Prince Will Come,” since they all come from different albums.
- When you want to delete songs, simply highlight them and press the delete key. If iTunes asks you whether you want to move the songs to the Trash, you should say yes if you want them removed from your hard drive.
Note: When you delete duplicates, they are moved to your trash, and when you empty the trash, the songs are gone for good. You might want to have a backup of your iTunes library before attempting this, just to make sure you don’t delete a copy of a song you want to keep!
Did this tip work for you? Have you found a better way to manage duplicates in your iTunes library? Let others know in the comments.
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{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve got quite a few dups in my itunes library right now and can find plenty of information as to how to fix that problem; however, I am wondering how they ever get there to begin with? The dups I have in my account seem so random – some are from cd’s I have imported, some are from cd’s or songs I have purchased from the itunes store and sometimes only certain songs from a cd will duplicate and others will not…I don’t understand how/why that happens. I know that I have not downloaded the same cd or bought the songs twice. Can you offer any feedback on that? Oh, and thanks for the very clearly written instructions listed in this post.
I use duplicate finder to remove duplicate songs from my music library, it says that it can easy move or Delete duplicate files and folder.
On Windows there is program called iDeduper to easily delete duplicate songs on iTunes.
http://www.ideduper.com
It is better to just hold down the Option key when entering the file menu. The menu selection will change to Show Exact Duplicates. This way you can really be eliminating exact duplicates.
My question is this. When I use itunes “find duplicate function, do I still have to manually sort through and pic out the duplicate, or can I quickly select all, delete all.
I’m afraid of throwing away both copies of the duplicated music.
jf
jay,
Be sure to hold down the Option key to Show Exact Duplicates and Command click to pick every other one showing. That way you don’t get rid of both. The key is holding the Option key when you enter the File menu. That way you don’t get a lot of files iTunes selects as possible duplicates.
It’s so frustrating to manually select the songs you don’t want to delete. Personally I use this: http://imdeduper.vistanita.com
Thanks for the post, itunes also has an option to “Show Exact Duplicates” meaning you don’t have to download anything or pay for anything to properly delete you duplicates. Check out how here: http://www.dagaza.com/2010/03/delete-duplicates-in-itunes/
Thank you very much. I had probably 5 of ever song in my friends library after adding my music to his computer. This made it very easy to fix. Thanks again.
You were very helpful. Thanks.
try this automatic tool to fast clean your duplicate files http://www.dublicatefilesdeleter.com/
the selecting and deleting individual files method is not very fun when you have almost 100 gigs of duplicates. why the hell doesn’t itunes have a way to do it automatically, like “show exact duplicates” and then “delete duplicates”?????? would that be so hard to add in there?
I hear ya, Paul. For a program that everyone raves about, it sure seems stupid that you can’t ‘delete exact duplicates’ from the file menu. I mean, if the Artist, Song title, size, bitrate, etc are an exact match, it would be less than intuitive for a program to automatically suggest you remove the duplicate, no?
This is actually NOT helpful as all it does is remove the duplicate from your iTunes library, but is DOES NOT actually delete the file . . . so the file is “gone” from the iTunes Library Display, but continues to exist on your machine in the hard drive where the iTunes library files are stored. Annoying.
In looking at the posts, it looks like the duplicate problem is with duplicate files. My problem is that ITunes is showing two of every song for the same exact file in the same directory. I believe it started when I changed my directory to a new hard drive when my old one failed. When I had ITunes look for my new hard drive, it actually duplicated a lot of the music. I used a program to find duplicates and delete them. Now the problem is that iTunes is showing two of every song for the same file on my computer. I verified this when selecting the “Get Info” function on the songs. Anyone know how to get ITunes to recognize the file only once?
In response to Hymus, are you able to play both versions of each song. If you are, they are both still there. If one was deleted and you try to play it, iTunes will highlight it to show that it does not exist. Then, just right click on the ones highlighted this way and “Remove from iTunes.” Make sure they are the ones that do not play.
Thaks for the reply Paul. Both are playable and both point to the same exact file in my file folder. This occured for all 10,000 plus songs on my library. I could live with it but it is a nuisance more than anything. I was planninng on sorting the library by created date and deleting the older ones but want to make sure it deletes it in ITunes only and not deleting the actual file. Experimenting with it right now! Any other suggesstions would be great!
Hello Hymus,
If there is a single version of each song, but iTunes shows two, it may be a permissions issue for your home directory Preferences folder, but you would see other issues if this were the case. You can Command I to the Preferences folder in ~/Library (where ~ is your home folder) to see if you have read/write access to it. If you don’t, that could be the cause of doubling everything that each points to the same file. If you have write privileges, then it is something related to iTunes and/or its Library file.
I have an external that I’ve used to “back up” my music numerous times. I have multiple folders that contain the same song. I know i have not done “back ups” the correct way, being lazy i have just copied files to my external knowing i have plenty of space. I got a new computer and all music is on the external.
How do I get files consolidated? and into one folder on my computer that can be used without having external?
@Hymus, I had the same problem. I selected all the music in the library and deleted everything so I had an empty music folder in iTunes. Then I selected “File > Add Folder to Library …” and selected the directory folder where all my music files reside (in subdirectories, natch). After iTunes scanned all the directories I ended up with a clean database in iTunes with only one entry for each song. Good luck!
I’m with the post complaining “why can’t it just delete exact duplicates automatically.” I also have about 2-300 gigs of music, and in backing up over the network, I’ve duplicated many of them. It’s a pretty daunting task to manually select every other entry of thousands, and delete them. Originally I compounded the problem by moving all the duplicates to a folder on my desktop, and then realized I was trashing a lot of good, original music too. This should be something itunes could fix with a line of programing code. It’s foolish to have to manually vet every pair that looks alike. and manually choose one.
Well, that’s still a lot of to do to manually selecting songs. I use imdeduper to clean my music library. It’s very easy to use.
you can select exact duplicate songs by holding down the alt (option) key on your mac before clicking on the file menu. then selecting exact duplicates.
Well, mine’s a totally different story.
I bought majority of my songs on my iPod Touch directly. Somehow, a glitch occured when I synced my iPod, and now all my bought songs are duplicated. It isn’t shown in my library on iTunes on my computer. How do I delete?
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