Removing iTunes duplicates

I recently had to rebuild my iTunes library to solve some weird situation that was preventing my iPhone from syncing with iTunes after a reformat and upgrade. In the process I managed to add about 25 albums to the library twice. Instead of Apple noticing that the action is simply going to result in byte-for-byte duplicates of entire albums, it decides to continue with the addition and just append ” 1.mp3″ to all of the filenames. Why the genius coders over at Apple decided this was a reasonable outcome I’ll never know, but it frustrates a music library neat freak like myself to no end.

After trying to convince various AppleScripts to make iTunes clean itself up, I stumbled across these instructions on the blog of Todd George on how to find and remove byte-for-byte duplicates from iTunes. It saved my sanity. Note that this simply removes the files from the filesystem, and not the entries from the iTunes library itself. Thankfully, Todd provides a link to a great method of finding the now dead entries in your library and removing them WITHOUT any additional scripts or programs.

iTunes is happy again!