[Nodnarb]

Originally from an Apple e-News:
There it goes again. You’re two minutes into Pink Floyd’s “Time,” and you could swear you just heard “Time” playing two minutes ago.

Of course, when you like an artist who has produced a lot of albums—Bonnie Raitt, Oscar Peterson, Pink Floyd, Sam Cooke, Eminem, Ray Brown, Christopher Parkening, Korn, Ray Charles, Joni Mitchell, or U2—it’s easy to import a CD or download a song or album from the iTunes Music Store without realizing that you already have a track or two in your collection.

But now there’s an easy way to find those duplicate songs and, if you’d like, silence the echoes. With your Library (or even a Playlist) selected, simply choose “Show Duplicate Songs” from the Edit menu. When you’re done perusing your duplicate songs, choose "Show All Songs."

This seems like a very useful feature except for one part. I pressed the show duplicate songs and I have like 350. I would delete all the duplicates, except I know that I, like most people, enjoy listening to albums in their entirety. If I deleted all the duplicates, I wouldn't be able to listen to complete albums. So my question is, would there be any way to have it so that iTunes could recognize that the same song is on multiple albums (and have different album names), but have it only play from the one single file to save space?

[ManOfSteal]

How does this "feature" work with different ID3 tag information between the same song?

[G4ME]

it only looks at the song title and the artist.

[Nodnarb]

Originally posted by G4ME:
it only looks at the song title and the artist.

Are you saying the show duplicate songs thing only looks at the song title and artist?


I think Apple or any other devloper should try to figure this out because I'm sure many people would love to be able to have only one of the same songs but still on it's original album. As I said before, I have 300 odd duplicate songs that I am going to leave as is so I can listen to comple albums even though it takes up a lot more space.

[Ghoser777]

What bugs me is I managed to buy the same song twice through the ITMS without a warning message! These songs are from the same album and everything.

Sometimes I get the warning, but not always.

[SOLIDAge]

this feature is completly useless to me.
i hit SHOW DUPLICATE SONGS
and i get 16 Wonderwalls
14 Bullet With Butterfly wings.
etc, etc

some people like me like to collect bootlegs and live recordings.
The feature should look at the ID tag and find dupliates, as in it has to match in every field.
that'd make it 100x more useful, but i realize that not everyone like me collects music Like I do.

[vmpaul]

Originally posted by SOLIDAge:

some people like me like to collect bootlegs and live recordings.
The feature should look at the ID tag and find dupliates, as in it has to match in every field.
that'd make it 100x more useful, but i realize that not everyone like me collects music Like I do.

Same here. This feature wasn't all that it was cracked up to be, to me.

But that's OK, I wasn't expecting it in the first place. I'm sure there's an Applescript somewhere that's better. Or maybe now that it's here, they'll improve it in the next rev.