Why are so many songs duplicated in my library?

Just recently lost hard drive to failure.  Replaced drive and reloaded ITunes.  Now I have many many songs that are duplicated in my library.......almost all of them!  Does this mean that I have duplicates in my ITunes music folder, or that I have more than one ITunes music folder?

EVERETTS wrote:
Does this mean that I have duplicates in my ITunes music folder, or that I have more than one ITunes music folder?
Well there is a question that you can answer with a little digging around. Exactly what you've got now depends a bit on which steps you took along the way. Also your media folder would normally be <User's Music>\iTunes\iTunes Media so the reference to iTunes Music suggests you may have a library that started life back with iTunes 8 or earlier.
Apple's official advice on duplicates 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 such as lost ratings and playlist membership.
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, this post for detailed instructions, 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.)
The most recent version of the script can tidy dead links as long as there is at least one live duplicate to merge stats and playlist membership to and copes sensibly when the same file has been added via multiple paths.
tt2

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