How to Delete Duplicate iTunes Songs

No doubt, iTunes is a great platform for managing and maintaining your music library. With the help of iTunes you can do pretty much everything – download, play, and save music. You can also manage and sync music files on your iPod, iPhone and iPad.

One of the great functions of iTunes is that it creates a virtual library to keep track of all your songs. This helps you organize your collection and speeds up finding songs. However, iTunes has some disadvantages. One of them is the duplicate songs problem.

Duplicate songs are a pretty common iTunes issue. They get created either when you download multiple versions of the same song, sometimes in different quality, or when you sync your music across several devices – then each of them ends up having duplicate songs. Duplicate music files can also get created when you import music. These duplicates waste disk space, bloat your mp3 collection and make it a nightmare to manage. Deleting them will free up space and help you manage your music library in a more efficient way.

iTunes has an option to find and remove duplicate songs. To make it show duplicates, go to File and select Display Duplicates. iTunes will then show you duplicates matched by the title of the song and the artist. This is a pretty good method to display duplicates, but it has one fault. If you have several versions of a song you want to keep, such as a studio and a live version, they will be marked as duplicates and you risk losing one of them. If you want to keep different versions of some songs, then it’s best to click on File and select Display Exact Duplicates. This will make the program show only the songs that have the same name, artist and album. You can narrow down the search results even more if you sort the files by date. To do that, click on top of the Date Added column. You can then go through the list and delete the duplicates you don’t need.

Even though the built-in iTunes method of finding duplicate songs is OK, it lacks one important feature. iTunes cannot match songs by file content, which means that there is always the danger that you may delete a song you’d rather keep. It also takes a lot of time to delete duplicate files with iTunes. So, if you are looking for a safer and quicker way to delete duplicate iTunes songs, then you should check out duplicate file management software for Mac. Make sure the program you choose can match files by content, which will guarantee that only true duplicates are deleted. Easy Duplicate Finder is a program that can do exactly that. It also automates the deletion process and speeds up managing duplicate songs a great deal.

Now you know how to delete duplicate iTunes songs. Remember to keep your music library free of duplicates and finding the right songs will become a lot quicker.