How to Remove Duplicate Songs From iTunes

If you have a massive iTunes library, there are bound to be a few duplicates. And when you're listening to your library, the duplicates keep repeating sometimes and that can get quite annoying.

These days, with the massive growth of music streaming services, this problem is unlikely to bother most people. However, if you’re still old school and use iTunes to manage your music, there are easy ways to get rid of the duplicates. Follow these steps and you can get the job done.

How to find and remove duplicate songs on iTunes
The first step has to be finding the duplicate songs. Doing this manually would take hours. Here’s what you need to do to automatically find duplicate songs in iTunes:

1. Open iTunes.
2. Click the Library tab.
3. Click File > Library > Show Duplicate Items. This will list all the duplicate songs on iTunes.
4. To remove duplicate songs on iTunes, you can select the copies you don’t need and delete them.

We tested this with quite a few songs and realised that iTunes simply identifies duplicate songs by file name and basic ID3 data. This means that if you've saved copies with the same file name in two different places, it'll spot the duplicate. It’s also good at spotting duplicates based on data stored in the MP3 file such as artist name or album name. But if your two copies have different names and the ID3 data is missing or incorrect, this method won’t work.

We tested this by stripping two different mp3 songs off ID3 data and saving them with the same file name in different folders. iTunes wrongly flagged these as duplicates but it’s not the only app out there that helps you remove duplicate songs.

Finding duplicate songs via third-party apps
That is where third-party apps enter the picture. If you have a Mac, follow these steps to find duplicate MP3 files on your computer:

1. Download Duplicates Cleaner from the Mac App Store. It’s a free app.
2. Open the app once it’s installed and point it to the folder where you store your music.
3. Duplicates Cleaner will identify all your duplicate music. Our test showed that it is quite adept at identifying duplicates with totally different file names too.
4. Once you’ve done that, right click (or secondary click, if you want to go by Apple’s terminology) on any song and click Multi-select duplicates and then click Clean duplicates. This lets you quickly get rid of multiple duplicate copies of any song.

For Windows users, here are the steps to find duplicate MP3 files on your computer:

1. Download Duplicate Cleaner Free. On the download page be sure to get the free version.
2. Open the app and then click the Scan location. This is where you direct the app to your music folder.
3. Once you’ve done that click Scan now at the top.
4. Duplicate Cleaner will now identify all duplicate songs in the folder. It works with duplicate songs that have different file names too.
5. Now click the check boxes next to all the songs you want to delete. Click File removal at the top.
6. In the pop-up, click Delete files.

Between these methods, you'll be able to find duplicate songs that have the same file name, and also duplicates that have been given different names. If two songs have the same name, iTunes will wrongly flag it, but Duplicate Cleaner will not, so you're covered in just about all the different scenarios that might come up. This will remove duplicate songs on iTunes and even outside of iTunes.

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