Delete the duplicate and delete the song??

Question

almost had it with itunes. please someone convince me that jriver isn't better than itunes if you actually have a collection!! Here's the latest in frustrations:
Thought i would clean up the library the other day and deleted about 30 gigs in "display duplicates" view. Wow! I knew i had some duplicate songs but 30 gigs?
hmmm...the brain starts to work now
"let me see if i can play these" i thinks to myself---after the deed was done.
gone.
but the tags are still there! wheeee! at least i can still look at dumb ones and zero's display in algorithims on my screen that amount to nothing! cool!!
and here's the best part: i have 289 albums left to go in duplicate mode!!
HERE'S THE KEY PROBLEM:
all the songs show as duplicate, but 99.99% are...the majority are duplicate song names pointing to the same file.
any way to clean this up would be great!

Answer 1

iTunes seems to work fine on fairly large collections. Haven't played with jriver media center much - isn't it a PC program? In my limited exposure it seemed counterintuitive sometimes, but, that might be because I'm more used to iTunes. Then the poor guy showing off his PC driven stereo to me had to reboot the PC part way through Probably a rare occurance, or so he says. On the other hand when I was showing what iTunes could do, I got the dreaded spinning beachball for about 30 seconds. So neither is perfect.
Dealing with duplicates is tricky business. On my collection showing duplicates mostly shows different versions of the same song by the same artist. Only a very few are actual duplicates that I imported twice by mistake.
You've learned the hard way that if you throw the "duplicate" song into the trash, then it goes into the trash. But wait, if you have not yet emptied your trash the music files may be sitting there and you can put them back where they belong.
Like anything you have to take it slowly and easy with iTunes so you learn how it works as you go. . .
It really is not a bad music player.
There are two parts to iTunes; the iTunes Library file, and the iTunes Music folder. The actual music is in the iTunes Music folder - never trash anything from there unless you are sure you never want to have it again. The iTunes Library file is just a database that points to your music.
If you somehow end up with multiple pointers in the iTunes Library file to the same music file in iTunes Music then when you delete the entry in iTunes Library you do not want to actually delete the music file in iTunes Music.
I haven't tried TP2's tip to search out duplicate/dead/ghost entries in the database - it might work, but before I tried it I'd see what it does on a small sample of the library, and then only if I had a good current backup of both the Library file and the Music folder. A music collection usually represents lots of time and money, it should be backed up (one big advantage of a digital music collection is it is much easier to backup than in the old analog days).