ITunes 11 removed Display duplicates option

Question

I downloaded iTunes 11 and there is no longer an option to Display Dupicates in the File menu.  Am I missing it somewhere or did they get rid of it?

Answer 1

I don't think implementation would have been an issue. Much of the behind the scenes code won't have been changed. The duplicates filter will most likely be a pretty standard SQL query.
One of the problems with the old display duplicates feature was that novice users would select all the displayed items and delete them, only to discover that their library now contained no copies of the tracks that had previously been duplicated. Even when this is understood there are a number of different ways of generating duplicates in iTunes, some of which create extra files on the hard drive, some of which don't. When deleting it is important to know which you have otherwise you can delete the only physical copy of a track in error. This is one of the reasons I wrote the DeDuper script, not because I needed it, but because I was interested to see if it could be done automatically and safely. I haven't completely achieved the second goal yet (problems with a special case where one file is added to the library from two different paths), but automating the process allows preservation & amalgamation of ratings, play counts, playlist membership which just isn't possible by hand.  See this thread for more background on it.
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