When I migrated some of my iTunes library to my MacBook Air, I somehow was inundated with hundreds of duplicates — the same song copied to the library multiple times. iTunes didn’t catch ‘em, and now there they are, ruining the shuffieness of my shuffle, hoarding my hard drive, mocking my inability to kill them without spending hours click-deleting their annoying asses.
iTunes has that Show Duplicates feature — the problem is there’s no way to bulk-select only the duplicates to remove them. Shift-click-click-click-click is really the only way to isolate the bad guys. Plus, it only filters songs based on Title and Artist, so the same song from different albums — i.e., a live version — are considered dupes.
Then I found Dupin, a godsend app from Doug Adams that lets you identify duplicate tracks in your iTunes library based on a wide-array of configurable criteria. Once they’re found, you can filter out only the dupes and purge them ruthlessly from your library. And it works great.
There’s a piece at the Mothersip about Dupin, and the website has screen shots and videos. It’s $15, but there’s demo version lets you identify twenty sets of duplicate tracks per session.
