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Better iTunes song deduping

**Update 4/24/2011. TidySongs is now Rinse! Same great product, but new vendor with a deeper music database that seems to match better. Ive updated the links. **

    • *Update 5/16/2010. When I am old and grey, I am going to tell my children about the most popular blog post I ever wrote, this one about iTunes deduping! I finally have to pass the baton of deduping on to

TidySongs, a product from a company that coincidentally is in my home town of Charlottesville, Virginia!


Im happy to share my hacked version of Doug Adams Corral iTunes Dupes AppleScript. You can grab my version from here.

His version uses some wicked fast PERL to find all the duplicate songs based on info in the Library, and then puts them all in a Dupes playlist. However, I wanted to filter by Name, Artist, and Album, and have a single playlist where I could delete in one fell swoop all the duplicates. So I tweaked his AppleScript to have another prompt that asks if you want all dupes to go in the playlist, or just copies 2…X to go in.

I run it once with “All” to make sure I have what I want, and then rerun it with “Just Dupes” and build the playlist of files to delete. Works great, and Im mailing him a copy, maybe itll be in the 1.1 version!

I was also very happy with the application Seek and Destroy Music Duplicates. It is written in Java using WebStart, and gave some good results as well. It is better in that you can pick which copy of the duplications you want to keep, and color codes each set of duplicates.

The tool iDupe really didnt do that much for me, and the demo is limited to just doing 3 deletes. Seek and Destroy is a better choice.