iTunes: Large amount of duplicate .mp3s

[Jorge]

A few months ago allowed iTunes full control over the organization of my .mp3 files.

Before you go into why I did this, save your keystrokes because I'm not here to debate my decision.

I had a drive failure a few months back and I recently got the drive contents transferred on a NAS.

Due to the recovery process I had a large amount of files that needed to be deleted. About 150K...

After going through and deleting unuseable files, I got my .mp3 back into iTunes.

I noticed that I have about 18k in duplicate music files, now I'm not sure if these files are due to the recovery process or an iTunes failure.

I have been exploring different ideas on how I am going to deal with the situation.

iDupe
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ipod_itunes/idupe.html

Tidysongs
http://www.tidysongs.com

I don't have the time to do this manually so I need to look at automated options.

Thoughts?

[Tic3]

I have the same problem and I've never been able to find a fix for it. I've read many accounts that iTunes just doesn't handle a large MP3 library - the duplicate file listing is the main complaint. It's not necessarily that you actually have duplicate files - it's just that there is a glitch in iTunes that causes it to list the same file multiple times.

I've made the mistake of deleting "duplicate" files only to find that not only was the duplicate listing was deleted, but the actual file was deleted. Not cool.

To find out for sure if you have duplicates or if it's just a glitch in iTunes, you just use the search feature in Windows Explorer to search for the song. If you get multiple copies, you can delete them from there and refresh/rebuild your iTunes library.

If you find an effective way of fixing this, I'd also be interested in knowing.

[RACKnRAIL]

With just over 1/2 a terabyte of music, I also had the same problem. I didn't try apple's app, you mentioned, but tidy tunes did not work as I expected. It mostly depends on how the mp3's are tagged from what I gather. The truth is it made a worse mess than I had before. I'm certain that I deleted songs that I shouldn't have by using software to solve my problems. I came to the conclusion that I should pay someone to do it, as I don't have time either.

I'm with Tic, if you find an effective software please let me know. Everything I tried just made things worse.

[Jorge]

I ended up using DupeGuru Music Edition (http://www.hardcoded.net/dupeguru_me/) to detect duplicate file names/song names. That got ride of a large portion of the files that were duplicates.

There are prolly another 2k duplicates in the system, but I will be cleaning these out by hand.