An excellent script for removing duplicate files from an iTunes library

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.