iTunes Duplicate Tracks
 

Okay, my wonderful iTunes has decided that I should have multiple copies of many of my tracks. I found many wonderful programs to scan for and remove said copies in a clean efficient manner. And the developers of the programs that I have found would like me to pay them a wonderful $35 for a program I will most likely fire up once a year. Not worth the money in my opinion.

Short of going through all of my songs (and there are many) individually, is there any free program or efficient manner by which I can remove all the duplicate and dead songs?

If it isn't an overwhelming number of tracks, there's a show duplicates option in the file menu. This will give you all tracks that have the same name and artist, and each copy of said track will be presented to you. But, as I've said this will only be useful if there aren't too many duplicates.

I use a program called Reasonable Noclone to do that sort of stuff. There is a free version you can try, although the lovely Internet has found me a free version of the Enterprise edition :)

More than 15k songs, which means literally hundreds of duplicates :S

That solves a completely different problem I was having, but what the programs I found do is actually go in and modify your iTunes library. As far as I now there is only 1 copy of each song on the hard disk, but because of iTunes errors it thinks there are multiple.

Well, you could always remove everything from your itunes library and then re-add it. As long as your files aren't kept in too many different places, that would be a way to get it done without too much hassle. Obviously, make sure you choose keep files. If it did produce more than one copy of each file on your hard drive though it won't amount to much.

Hmmm...I could merge my current library with my slightly outdated backup one, then use Zerg's suggestion and reimport it. That would be perfect. I'll try that.

Duplicate Remover
 

I recommend Clone Remover. This is program for finding duplicate files, such as photo files, music files, and image files. It has the following ways to search for duplicate files: search by content, search by properties, files with a zero size.


remove duplicate items from itunes

I would just do the manual labor and check the info on each file to figure out where the duplicates are. My library is like 28k, and whenever I hit a double (or triple) I go to the folder itself and delete it so the next time I have to redo my library it's not there. I'm not sure how you sort yours but I keep mine all centralized on one of my HDs