Imagine this scenario…
You are an avid music lover. You are interested in a wide range of music and since you cannot have enough of it, you are always searching and downloading mp3s from the net. During the course of time, you have built up a huge music library which you are very proud of. While you were downloading all the music you could get your hands on, you mistakenly downloaded multiple copies of the same song.
This came to happen because the names of the same songs were either different or misspelled on the internet. With the passage of time, you iTunes library, that you were once proud of, became more and more disorganized, disheveled and disproportionately blown up. Now you have several copies of the same song in your library which you cannot get rid of. These are occupying lots and lots of your disk space. And you have no idea how to get rid of them so that you can free space on your disk and download some of new songs. There is nothing you can do. You are desperately looking for a way to remove duplicates from iTunes, but you have no idea how to go about doing it.
The idea of manually listening to, and removing all those duplicate songs gives you the creeps because, first of all it is a very long process and second, it involves the risk of manual errors.
There is a feature available in iTunes itself to remove duplicates from your library. The process goes like this:
Click File, then click “Display Duplicates“.
iTunes will now return a list of all duplicate songs. This will help you in the deletion process once you sort them by the dates these songs were added to your collection. This is a good option but then again, it involves a lot of your input since you must select each and every song from iTunes list for either deletion or marking.
In such a case, you need to find software that would remove duplicates from iTunes automatically with minimum input. It will be better if the software can digitally listen to all your tracks and match them with an available database of songs so that any mistakes in song names and artist names can be overridden.
These days, there is a whole bunch of software available on the net that claim to do just that. Most of this software do not work at all or do not work as well as they claim.
One of the software that really works, and has a great reputation is TidySongs. It is not an ordinary iTunes plug-in. Rather, it performs multiple functions that help you arrange and organize your iTunes library. Meanwhile, if you are reluctant to buy this program, you can download a trial version and work with it for sometime before actually buying it. The plug-in is very user friendly and gives a smooth performance even with beginners. The only thing that you have to do is click on the “Find Duplicate” function. From there the software will automatically scan your collection of songs and remove the duplicates from your iTunes library.
