Finding Duplicates Help, Please!

[PTVMan]

I'm trying to help my wife transition from a horrible Sony Vaio laptop to a new MacBook Air. i copied her iTunes library from the Sony to an external drive and noticed that the total size was 56GB! When I connected the external drive to the MacBook Air I noticed that each and every song has 3 copies! Not different versions, but exact duplicates times 3. For example:

Carly Simon

01 Clouds In My Coffee.mp3
01 Clouds In My Coffee 1.mp3
01 Clouds In My Coffee 2.mp3

This pattern holds true for every song by every artist in the files that I copied to the hard drive. Before adding/importing her music into the iTunes library on her new MacBook Air is there a way to find/delete all these damn duplicates without going artist by artist, song by song? Any apps or utilities that can handle this ridiculous problem?

 

[simonsi]

I would guess you either have 3 copies on the Vaio in the first place or have managed to run the import 3x.

Easiest may be to delete or rename the folder and re-import (then delete the multi-copy one once you have a clean import).

Another option maybe to run Gemini or similar to look for those duplicates.

 

[alfiolora]

Remove all the unwanted, duplicated files from your machine. Software name is DuplicateFilesDeleter.

 

[newellj]

This summer I had to clean up my >1TB iTunes library that went back to Napster days (before iTunes) and had been migrated across quite a few machines. (Huge task...)

I had many hundreds of duplicates. I used TuneSweeper to identify the duplicates and then sort of gave up and just did a mass delete. It was basically a mistake, because songs are identified by title, but the problem is that in some cases a song with the same title was actually three different recordings in three different albums. So, I wound up with a lot of incomplete albums, and in the end had to re-import dozens of CDs. Where I had purchased songs or albums from iTunes, I was able to re-import that way.

To make a long story short, be careful about deleting songs. It may be worthwhile going through a list from TuneSweeper or Gemini or whatever on a song by song basis.

YMMV, BTDT...