Thousands of duplicate songs

So after installing itunes 7.6 on my work Windows XP PC, my itunes library file got corrupted, and for some reason, Itunes couldn't find any of my songs. So deleted my old library file, and reinstalled the 13,000+ songs and videos I have on my external Maxtor hard drive. Problem is, now some 9,700+ of those songs are showing up listed two or 3 times in my iTunes as duplicate songs, even though said songs have the same location filepath under properties. Is there any way I can solve this? It would take me WEEKS to lose all the dupes. I have no problem deleting my library file again since I just did it.

Have a look at Teridon's iTunes Scripts there's a script in there for dealing with duplicates: Teridon's iTunes for Windows Scripts

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THOUSANDS of duplicate songs in iTunes. How do I get rid of all the doubles

With the iTunes update I hit the organize my library button and this caused iTunes to find the same songs in several different folders, so that now I have thousands of songs in iTunes with doubles, triples and quadruple copies. Is there a program or setting which will allow me to consolidate my library down to the single original copies of each song. I normally have like 12 gb of music but now I have 27 gb with all the doubles. Hope someone can help.

When you are editing the songs - are you just chopping to top and bottom off? using the start and finish options?
If you do, it might be that for some reason iTunes is forgetting the settings.
You could always create an mp3 copy within iTunes and delete the other.

How do remove thousands of duplicate songs with the same date?

Brand new mac book pro. Made the move from windows. Migration asst moved music from pc to itunes. I also have iPhone/iPad2. Now I have 2-4 versions of every song and they all have the same date. How can I get down to just one version of each song?

Yes there is a way. Post back with the following information:
1. With respect to your home directory, what is the exact folder that the files are in (ie, are they in the Documents folder, or in a subfolder within the Documents folder). What are the exact names (caps included) of these directories?
2. What is the exact name scheme of the files? You mentioned they are incremented numerically, but what are the rest of the files' names (again, capitalization is important)?
With this information, there are several ways to approach the problem, which will basically be four steps to ensure you do not inadvertently remove files you wish to keep:
1. Create a new folder to temporarily house the files.
2. Issue a command to target the files by name and move them into a separate folder.
3. Check the old parent folder to ensure nothing is missing, and optionally check the names of the moved items.
4. Finally delete the contents of the temporary folder, along with the folder itself.
The specifics of these steps will depend on the names of the files and the folder that they are in, so provide as much information as you can about that, and we can work through the steps.

HT201812 I have thousands of duplicates. "Show Duplicates" does half the work. Help.

I recently consolidated a couple incomplete backups into a brand new iTunes library on my Macbook Air.
Despite needing to load both collections to cover all my music, there are thousands of duplicate song files in iTunes.
I can use "Show Duplicates" to show all of them in one screen. But Apple's advice was to simply "select the duplicates I want to delete."
Now, I suppose I can take an extra day off work, Press Command and start to click on every other file listed for several hours and hope I don't mess up at any point and have to start over.
But I have to believe in this technologically advanced world, that there is a better way to accomplish this goal.
Please help me dear sweet Internet.

The first thing you should try to fix this problem is to sync your iPhone with iTunes over USB instead of WiFi. If that doesn't work. Delete the music that is corrupted on your iPhone from your iTunes library. Re-sync your iPhone with iTunes make sure it deletes the music. Then, reload the music on, and sync via USB. If none of that works, the only possible solution is to restore your iPhone's firmware.

I want to delete my duplicate songs, but I have thousands of songs and cannot realistically go through and review and delete them one at a time. Can I do it all at once?

I want to delete my duplicate songs, but I have thousands of songs and cannot realistically go through and review and delete them one at a time. Can I do it all at once?

Apple's official advice is here... HT2905 - How to find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library. It is a manual process and the article fails to explain some of the potential pitfalls.
Use Shift > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to display duplicates as this is normally a more useful selection. You need to manually select all but one of each group to remove. Sorting the list by Date Added may make it easier to select the appropriate tracks, however this works best when performed immediately after the dupes have been created. If you have multiple entries in iTunes connected to the same file on the hard drive then don't send to the recycle bin.
Use my DeDuper script if you're not sure, don't want to do it by hand, or want to preserve ratings, play counts and playlist membership. See this thread for background and please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping.
(If you don't see the menu bar press ALT to show it temporarily or CTRL+B to keep it displayed)
tt2

Duplicate songs all over the place!

Ok, first let me give you the layout.
16 GB iPod Nano
Dell Inspiron E1505 with Vista Home Premium
Linksys WR310N (GigE switch)
Sony Vaio running Windows Server 2003
I have ALL of my music located on a shared partition on my Windows 2003 server. I have mapped a network drive (M) to a folder containing all my organized music on this server. Organized meaning.........root folders are Genres (Rock, Pop, Country, Contemporary Chistian, i.e.), with Artist / Band folders under the Genres folders. And under the Artist / Band folders, are the album (yes, old school) names with songs under there. Make sense?? ok. Moving on.
I have uninstalled iTunes numerous times in an effort to consolidate and prevent duplicate songs / albums / artists from showing up in my Music list as well as on my iPod.
In order to put music in my Library > Music folder, I have to Add Folder to Library from the File Menu in iTunes. Not only does this take FOREVER since iTunes has to determine each song, then determine some gapless info, but it hasn't even moved anything yet.
Once it is done, I am able to move music to my playlists, and sync. Syncing takes an eternity as well since it is copying all the mp3's to my iPod.
Now in order to remove OR add music to my iPod, this whole adventure has to be repeated, and then duplicates start appearing in my Library > Music folder.
I have verified several albums NOT to be duplicate on my share, but they show up numerous times in my Library! Why is this??? This means I have to go thru thousands of songs to determine which ones are duplicates in an effort to NOT put the songs on my iPod twice.
Why is it that I am not able to view my iPod as a piece of "disk" LIKE IT IS! This is nothing more than a glorified thumb drive with a small OS. I should be able to use Winders Explorer to remove and/or add music with a drag / drop option. Why is that I have to SYNC this thing ever time I want to take 5 songs off, and add 2. This should be a 5 second ordeal, not 2 hours!!!
Now that being sad, is there an easier way to do this??? Is there something I am missing............or not doing correctly?? I used to use an app called Anapod with my older iPod, but they seem to have went 'under'.........as their URL is no longer active. Sad thing..............cuz that app was the BEST!
Plz advise............Thanks
Bob

iCloud- Resolving duplicate Contacts after setting up iCloud Contacts

Consolidation made thousands of duplicates

I have never had problems with consolidation until today. But today I clicked the consolidate button and after about a minute of watching the blue bar, I realised that something was wrong, as I thought there were only about 100 songs or so to move. I tried to Stop, but it wouldn't respond. Finally, when it did respond, about three minutes later, I found that it had copied all other tunes into the itunes folder, whether they were already there or not, so now I have thousands of duplicates.
Could somebody tell me why this has happened, how I can stop this from happening again, and what the **** I can do with all these duplicates. (The duplicates do not show up in the itunes library).
(I have just upgraded to itunes 6.0.4 from 6.0.3: might that have had anything to do with it? )

I'd just like to add a little more here.
All the duplicates are like this: Lullaby.mp3 and Lullaby 1.mp3.
I assumed that I could simply find all the 1.mp3 files with Spotlight and delete them. However, I have found that for some reason the itunes library refers to the 1.mp3 files. Therefore, If I delete them, I would then have to delete all of the library entries, and then find and add all the relevant files from the itunes folder into the library. This is going to take ages, and if anybody has a better idea I'd like to know.
Just as importantly, I'd like to know why this happened, and what steps I can take to avoid it happening again.

Duplicate songs on iTunes - how to delete.

I have thousands of songs in my iTunes library that are duplicates. Is there a way to delete many duplicate songs at once?

Use Shift > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to display duplicates as this is normally a more useful selection. You need to manually select all but one of each group to remove. Sorting the list by Date Added may make it easier to select the appropriate tracks, however this works best when performed immediately after the dupes have been created. If you have multiple entries in iTunes connected to the same file on the hard drive then don't send to the recycle bin. Use my DeDuper script if you're not sure, don't want to do it by hand, or want to preserve ratings, play counts and playlist membership. See this thread for background and please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping.
(If you don't see the menu bar press ALT to show it temporarily or CTRL+B to keep it displayed)
tt2

Duplicate songs on import

I have seen other posts on this whereby the advice was to highlight the duplicate song and then clear. When you are bringing in a thousand songs or more and they are duplicating this is a huge deal. I had Creative Sound Labs equipment before. It was a lot more versatile. They had an automatic search and update fuction which would search selected files for new songs and automatically bring them into the library. You could also search and delete duplicates with the touch of one button. Assuming that I-tunes doesn't have this type of functionality, is there any chance we can actually send I-tunes an e-mail suggesting they give Creative Sound Labs a call for some tips? ha ha
Seriously...I am finding this very frustrating.

A new library doesn't automatically see music that you'd like in it, even if you set the iTunes Music folder location to an existing music folder. (That just tells the library where to put new music that you rip or download.) You have to Add your music to the library, just like you did with the first library.
Yes, you could keep a special library for the iPhone using the same music folder as the first library, but PT is right. It's much simpler to maintain a special playlist within your current library for syncing to the iPhone.
iMac G4 17; iBook G4 1.33 Mhz 14; iPod 3G 20GB Mac OS X (10.3.9)

How do I get rid of duplicate songs on iPhone?

I have the iPhone 4 and with one of the recent updates, my iTunes changed. Now when my phone syncs with my iTunes library, it has a lot of duplicate songs showing up on the phone. I went through manually and deleted them off my phone, but then when syncing again recently, they were all put on there again. What can I do to get duplicates off there for good?

Settings > Music > Show All Music > Off
tt2

Some of my songs are listed twice on my iPod itself. However, when I plug the iPod into my computer, the songs don't show up twice in iTunes when I click on device/music. How do I get rid of the duplicate songs on my iPod?

Some of my songs are listed twice on my iPod itself. However, when I plug the iPod into my computer, the songs don't show up twice in iTunes when I click on device/music. How do I get rid of the duplicate songs on my iPod?

that is odd! that should not be happening.
Are you syncing your songs right off of itunes itself? because it should be syncing over to the ipod however it is listed in itunes.

How do I delete duplicate songs from my iphone???

This is the 3rd iPhone I've lost, and now there are TONS of duplicate songs in my iTunes library.
How do I get rid of the duplicates so I can transfer them to my iphone? Please help! I'm not too tech savvy.
Thanks!

When you're looking at the "song" section of your iPhone, you want to swipe to the right on the song you wish to remove. A red button should pop up saying "delete". When you click that button, the song will no longer be there.

How do you delete duplicate songs in your library without having to delete each song individually??

How do you delete duplicate songs in your library without having to delete each song individually?

mauijiminar wrote:
Go to iTunes, select view and click show duplicates. Hold control and A ( select all) and then delete.
Not a good idea! The "show duplicates" feature shows "all" duplicate tracks, but you only want to delete the "extra" copies, not the "originals".
I've written a script called DeDuper which can help remove unwanted duplicates. See this thread for background, including how to delete the extra tracks manually if you prefer.
tt2

How do I delete duplicate songs from my iphone 4s

I have tried re-syncing with my iTunes on my PC and it doesn't work. Just says "syncing" and quickly goes through the steps, and everything on the iphone is still the same. I can delete albums from my collection on my PC and they delete from the iphone, but the duplicate songs are not showing up on the PC and they are in the phone and I can't see any way to get rid of them without deleting the whole album from my collection.

I just had this happen when I wanted "normalized" music on my iPhone because I am no satisfied with sound check. All my songs still had different volumes. I turned off the cloud on my phone and added music with USB. I turned the cloud back on and I got the duplicate issue. Here is what I did to fix it:
Turn off Match on phone
Update match in iTunes from the "store" menu (see below for why this might be REALLY important.
Connect phone
Check "manually manage" in iTunes from the first tab when you click your phone in the left pane
Open the "tree" for you iPhone in iTunes by clicking the triangle.
Select "music" in that tree.
Delete all the Music from the phone.
Sync it.
Eject phone.
Turn match back on and download music via the iPhone but this takes a while.
or I just reconnected it, then went to the music tab for the phone ticked the sync option and checked the playlists I wanted. I synced it. I then made sure "manually manage" was checked in first tab, then went into the left pane and deleted the playlists. This leaves the music on the iPhone but not the playlists. I ejected and turned on match on the phone.
My guess is there is a glitch where identical playlists from the cloud seemed to conflict with the ones physically on the phone and / or iTunes match could not match the physical files on the phone. It seems my metadata for the files "seemed" different than the ones in the cloud. Running RealPlay gain on my library is suspect for my issue so if something happened on your computer that changed the data about your files even without you knowing, this might be the issue. It is merely a hypothesis but it seems logical. Resyncing match then putting the newly understood match on the phone seems to resolve my issue.

How do I delete duplicate songs

A while back I when I opened iTunes I was prompted to do something relating to how my library was organized. Unfortunatley I didn't read it very closely and just click OK and it began to duplicate almost every song in my library so now I have 3 copies of each song in each folder. Not sure what I did but it's taking up tons of space and I need to get it back to normal. Anyone have any ideas?

EN You could delete all duplicate songs manually or use a software who will do that (but they are often bad or spams...).
Sorry but i don't don't speak very well English...
FR Tu peux les supprimer à la main ou utiliser un logiciel mais ils sont souvent mauvais ou pleins de publicités...
Désolé mais je ne parle pas très bien anglais...

Thousands of duplicate songs

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