After shifting some media around I recently found myself with a lot of duplicate files in my iTunes library. iTunes’ “Show Duplicates” feature is a nice thought but doesn’t come near being useful in the case of thousands of duplicates — not only is the heuristic sophomoric, there is no way to select “every other” file — you must select either all the files or none of them.
I searched far and wide for a third-party program or script and was surprised by how poor the solutions were. I found a handful of shareware programs that were either flakey, underfeatured, overpriced, or all of the above, and a smattering of shell scripts that didn’t do quite what I was looking for.
Finally I came across this applescript, and it does precisely what I want (and what I imagine everyone with this problem wants): finds duplicate songs according to user-specified metadata dimensions, and put “all but one” of each file in a playlist. Select all, option delete, DONE.
Glad my script helps you! I swear, sometimes the littlest things, like that script, are the blog articles everyone hits!
Is there a Windows XP variant of this script?
Verry nice thanks for the excelent work !!
Heh. I got a bunch of errors when I extracted the files, and the program was not found. A flop!
were u able to find a windows xp and or vista script variant to get rid of the duplicate entries in i-tunes? i have no clue what i did wrong but i know have doubles triples and in some cases quads of my entire library…grgr!
This seems only to remove dups from a playlist not the actual music folder…
I use Duplicate Finder by Ashisoft to remove duplicate duplicate files from my windows system and always want one for my MAC. Thank you for this script.
http://www.ashisoft.com
@ian, in that playlist, highlight all to be deleted, edit the info, and rename them to Artist: delete. then in your library delete all artists named delete
I have been searching for such a script for long time and it was a helping info for me. Thanks a lot.
i use duplicate file remover software called duplicate finder 2009