A tool to help find the duplicates in iTunes
ITunes There is a simple suggestion that may come in very useful for those of you who may have duplicate song issues in iTunes. As you are probably aware, iTunes includes a tool to help find the duplicates; simply choose File -> Show Duplicates, and iTunes will create a list of all the songs it believes are duplicates.
The only problem with this feature is that it is quite liberal in deciding what is and is not a duplicate. Accordingly, the list of potential duplicates can be very big – especially if you have a number of different versions of the same song by the same artist.
So here is the trick – the Option key. Hold it down, then select File, and notice that Show Duplicates has changed to Show Exact Duplicates.
The resulting list will be much shorter, since only select exact duplicates. This functionality is covered in the Help of iTunes, where it states:
Press the Option key and select File> Show Duplicates are exact multiple copies of the same song (if, for example, without wishing to import the song twice).
However, according to comments I heard this suggestion before, it seems that this feature is not well known.
Whether you need more help removing duplicates than this method offers，for example, clearing out hundreds of duplicates is not necessarily an easy task, even if you have identified them，then you might want to check out Dupin, which offers a number of features to help solve your duplicate woes, including automating the duplicates deletion. Christopher Breen discussed Dupin in more detail in his article on handel iTunes dupes.
