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Removing huge amounts of duplicates (iTunes)

post #1 of 12
12/18/09 at 1:01pm
Thread Starter 
I just moved all my music to my new computer (through my external hard-drive). I let iTunes automatically add all the songs from my "My Music" folder. Now it appears that I have a duplicate of every single song I have (not 100% sure since I haven't checked all of them) in my iTunes library. Most duplicate removal systems seem to be "check-and-delete" but this would obviously take too long. Is there any simpler way to remove duplicates or do I have to try to re-do the whole uploading to iTunes?
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post #2 of 12
12/18/09 at 1:05pm
There's no simple way to do it; just go through and delete them. Yes, I know it sucks. I had to do it about a week ago... PAIN~!
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post #3 of 12
12/18/09 at 1:07pm
Thread Starter 
I would rather delete everything and try uploading again. Literally thousands of duplicates. Even at the pace of 3/sec it would take me 30 minutes.
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post #4 of 12
12/18/09 at 2:23pm
Did it list every song twice or did it physically create a copy of every file? Back in the day when I still used itunes, it did that to me once. I did a search for all the duplicates (which had a "(1)" at the end of the filename) and deleted everything in one lump.
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post #5 of 12
12/18/09 at 3:10pm
Last time I had that happen on an iPod, I threw it out the window and bought a Zune... Then my Zune started to die so I bought a new iPod. I feel dirty.
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post #6 of 12
12/18/09 at 3:34pm
I would just start with a fresh Library.
Cause I am quite sure that will take noticeable shorter time than deleting every duplicate.
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post #7 of 12
12/18/09 at 5:40pm
Apple Script + iTunes = your friend.

If not on a Mac, then PERL + iTunes is your friend.
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post #8 of 12
12/18/09 at 8:19pm
Or try something other than itunes.
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post #9 of 12
12/18/09 at 9:24pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Armaegis View Post
Or try something other than itunes.
If the duplicates exist in iTunes then that typically means there are dupes on the hard drive. No matter what program he uses he'll need to run some script to drop all duplicates.
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post #10 of 12
12/18/09 at 9:37pm
GIYF. Lots of scripts out there for the Mac to fix this.

On the PC, delete the whole library and re-load; most likely you do not have physical dupes, only phantom entries.
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post #11 of 12
12/18/09 at 11:44pm
It will be easy to tell if there are physical dupes, go into a directory and look for 'song title'.mp3 and 'song title 1'.mp3

iTunes appends a sequential number to each additional copy of a track located in the same directory. If you go through a few directories and notice an extra copy of each track there is a good chance this is replicated for all dupes.
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post #12 of 12
12/19/09 at 2:28pm
Thread Starter 
I re-transferred everything and it worked fine, no duplicates anymore. I wonder why it happened in the first place... Thanks anyway!
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