How-To: Remove Duplicate Songs from iTunes

You've downloaded all these songs and you have finally found the time to open iTunes and move it over to your iPhone or iPod Touch, but you notice something -  a lot of your songs are duplicates. The bigger problem is, you have over 8,000 wonderful songs in your library and there is no way you are going to dedicate your precious Saturday to manually deleting duplicates in your iTunes library. The wonderful thing is that you don't have to....follow me and I have a few quick solutions for you to use to delete those dupes.



First...how to do this using iTunes (these directions are based on iTunes 9, if you don't have it, download it here):

1. Open iTunes and make sure you have navigated into your iTunes Music Library.


2. From the menu, hold your "Options" button (on Windows press "Shift") and click on "File".


3. Now select "Show Exact Duplicates". (my screenshot does not show it, because you can not press option and take a screenshot without it performing another function)


4. Look through your list and see what is a duplicate ( I would suggest actually listening to a few seconds to see if this is true, as iTunes recognizes Live and Album versions as dupes).


5. Select the songs you would like to delete and delete them.


6. Press "Delete" and you will be prompted asking if you are sure you want to delete.


7. When you delete you will be prompted by iTunes to either "Keep Files" or "Move to Trash". Select "Move to Trash"

Now, I think this method is simply not that efficient, nor reliable. You can make a mistake and think something is a duplicate when it's really not and it only saves you so much time versus going through your entire list and deleting that way. So I have a few other solutions, and of course they are those lovely applications that help do the work.

App Solutions for Macs:

1. iDupe ($8) - This has widely been confirmed around the net , as the solid solution for removing duplicate songs in iTunes on your Mac.


2. Dupin ($15) - Everyone else that doesn't use iDupe, use's Doug's AppleScript for iTunes, it's free and it works.


3. DupeGuru ME ($25) - Works on Mac and PC


4. TidyUp ($30) - Does more than iTunes clean up

App Solutions for Windows:

1. Dupe Eliminator ($35) - Rated well by CNET, I've personally never tried it.


2. Duplicate Finder ($24)


3. DupeGuru ME ($25) - Works on Mac and PC

I would say give them all a TRY, use the trials that the developers offer and see which app works best for you. If you guys have used any other solutions, share them, we all need to know what works!

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