How To Find Duplicate Items in iTunes

If you’re like me and have spent years building your iTunes library, you may have accidentally included a number of duplicate items. These can either be simple duplicates of the song, different remixes of the same song or just higher quality versions of songs. You may have also accidentally ripped the same CD a couple of times or may have bought the album on iTunes after already ripping your CD.

Now, with these duplicate items, no matter which means were used to obtain them, you can become frustrated by iTunes sometimes playing the same song twice in succession or it appearing two to three times in automatically generated playlists.

Here we will show you how to easily remove them directly in iTunes without any additional software.

Show Duplicates in iTunes

Apple includes an option in iTunes that lets you “Show Duplicates.” Here’s how you can access it.

1. Open iTunes.

2. From the View menu in the Toolbar, select “Show Duplicates.”

Once you’ve enabled this feature, iTunes will show all the duplicate files in your library. But the problem with this particular feature is that it will include all apparent duplicates of songs listed. That means that iTunes can include original studio versions, live versions, remix versions, cover versions, etc. which you may want to keep.

if you want to display the exact duplicates of your items, follow the steps below:

1. Open iTunes.

2. Click on “View” in the menu bar.

3. Press the “Option” key on your keyboard (“Control” for Windows), and you should see “Show Duplicates” change to “Show Exact Duplicates.”

Selecting this will now be the same as the standard duplicates view except for a more concise listing of revealed songs.

Now you can remove those duplicate songs from your library.