Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Submitted as an anonymous hint...' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Submitted as an anonymous hint...
Authored by: robg on Jun 28, '04 09:15:34AM
But it really belongs with this thread, so here it is...
There are 2 easy ways to find duplicate tracks in your iTunes library. One, you can get a script from Doug's iTunes scripts at http://www.malcolmadams.com/itunes/index.php. There are some nice ones there, but they take a loooong time to run. After letting one go all night and still not be finished, I tried to come up with a better way.

I sort of did. When two tracks have the same filename and are part of the same artist/album, iTunes gives the second one a number; if you already have song.mp3 in an album directory, and another song.mp3 gets added, the second one will be renamed to song 1.mp3. So, if you want to quickly round up all of your possibly duplicate tracks, simply search in the finder for all instances of "1.mp3". Make sure that they're all real duplicates- stuff like part11.mp3 will come up, too.

Now, delete them. Start up iTunes. It probably won't know they're gone until it tries to do something with them. Try to sync up your iPod- this will make iTunes realize that the tracks are gone. (I had added a bunch of songs, many of them dupes, all in one day. So I made a playlist of all the songs added that day and then tried to sync that. That's how I was able to try to sync all of the dead songs even though my entire music library won't fit on one iPod.) Then, go to Doug's iTunes Applescripts and install and then run "Super Remove Dead Tracks". Viola.
-rob.

[ Reply to This | # ]
Quick'n'dirty shell command..
Authored by: HugoTheFrog on Jul 29, '04 09:21:04PM
Here's a quick command line to do what the above poster suggested..

find . -name '*\ 1.mp3' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Run this from your ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music directory. NB: the escaped space ('\ ') will mean files like Chapter11.mp3 won't get deleted - but if you have 'Chapter 1.mp3' it will get deleted! User beware!

[ Reply to This | # ]