How-to Tips - Find and remove duplicate songs in your iTunes library

After years of use, many iTunes users would find their iTunes music library messed up with songs that show more than once. These duplicate songs would eat a lot of storage and make music enjoying less enjoyable.  Thus, today I would like to share 2 ways to find and remove duplicate songs in iTunes music library, and make a simple comparison between these 2 solutions.

Solution 1 – iTunes

Apple already prepared options within iTunes to help iTunes users find and remove song duplicates. You could follow the below steps to get rid of duplicates.

Find duplicates

1.      Choose View > Show Exact Duplicate Items.

Matches are based on the song name and artist. If you have multiple versions of the same song (for example, live and studio versions, or versions from different albums) you can hold the Alt or Option key (for Mac OS X) or the Shift key (for Windows) and choose View > Show Exact Duplicate Items. This will show only duplicate songs having the same name, artist, and album.

2.      Duplicate items will be sorted next to one another. Review each item to determine which one you'd like to remove from your library. You can compare the track length, date added, genre, play count, size, bit rate, and more to help you determine which item you'd like to keep and which item you'd like to remove.

Delete duplicates

1.      Select the duplicate you want to delete. Remove it by choosing Edit > Delete.

2.      When you are finished removing duplicate items from your library, choose View > Show All Items.

The solution 1 is copied from Apple Support Center. You could directly visit the post at http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201812.

Solution 2 – Tunes Cleaner

Also, there’re a lot of wonderful iTunes cleaner program that could act as iTunes alternative but perform even better, like Tunes Cleaner – a 3^rd-party iTunes cleanup program that could complete music info and remove song duplicates in iTunes music library (Mac users could turn to Tunes Cleaner for Mac). The below shows you how to find and remove song duplicates for iTunes with Tunes Cleaner.

1.            Run this Tunes Cleaner and then click "Clean-up Duplicate" entry;

2.            The program provides 2 duplicate scanning modes: Quick Scan mode and Deep Scan mode. Select one of them to scan dong duplicates.

3.             Click the green “Scan iTunes” button;

4.             The Tunes Cleaner would display all song duplicates one another. You could preview and then determine which ones to remove.

5.             Click the “Remove” button to remove song duplicates in batch.

It should be noted that the Quick Scan mode scans your iTunes music library and determine song duplicates upon song info including song Name, Artist, Album, File Size and Time. You could custom the elements to determine song duplicates. While the Deep Scan mode adopts advanced Acoustic Fingerprint technology to detect song duplicate more exactly, but costs more time.

Simple comparison

Both methods provide effective solutions to help you remove song duplicates. But you could see that Tunes Cleaner could obviously detect song duplicates more exactly as it has more elements to determine whether songs are duplicates or not.