iTunes Duplicates help needed......

[marc55]

Hey guys,

My iTunes library consists of 21,618 songs, but my problem is I have 6,500 duplicates.

I know I can go in and simply delete the duplicates; however, I did that, and it really screwed up the various playlists for me and my wife, so I had to restore iTunes from Time Machine.

The issue with simply deleting the duplicates is, I don't know which ones are on the playlists.

I guess I could write down every song in each play list, and bounce that against the duplicates, but that is a lot of work.

Have any of you guys faced this before; and if so, how did you resolve it?

Insight greatly appreciated

Thank you

 

[BrianBaughn]

I don't think you'll be able to do it without a lot of work.

You must be referring to Apple Music in your case and I'm thinking you must have the "Add songs to Library when adding to playlists" option checked in preferences.

In my case, I've got that preference unchecked. I actually backed up and emptied my entire library and started over with a mostly streaming library. The only songs/albums I have on my computer (main library) are the ones that Apple Music doesn't have.

I'm thinking if you exported your playlists, delete your playlists, cleaned up your library again, unchecked the above option, and then imported the playlists the dupes would be gone from the library and no further dupes would be created. It would be easy to test this method before diving in completely.

You could have a valid reason for not wanting to do it this way, I'm sure.

 

[vkd]

In iTunes 12.5.3.17 on 10.9.5 in the menu path: File > Library, there are some options for Import, Export and Show Duplicate Items for Playlists.

In iTunes Preferences, in the Advanced tab, there is a checkbox to 'Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library'. It would seem a good idea to leave that option unchecked.

 

[Zazoh]

Some of my duplicates are actually slightly different, songs that appear on different albums by the same artist for example.

I came to this realization once, I, at one time, had close to 30,000 songs, then I noticed on the status bar that if I put started playing songs it would take me 114 days to listen to them all without repeating one. I'm currently down to 22 days worth of music. Go to View Status Bar to see how much you have.

Realistically I realized this would never happen, so I just focus on Playlists now, which are in constant flux. With my subscription to Apple Music I now just stream most content, if I like it I add to a playlist, if I don't, I delete from Library, at 53 I'm still discovering new things and tastes, but I no longer collect music just to have.