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
As Iain Atkinson says, it doesn’t seem to actually remove the tracks from the Music folder and instead, just the playlist that is created.
Hello! This looks like this is the solution I’ve been looking for, but the link appears dead these days. Any chance for another working link or for an email with the script?
Thanks- Jonathan