[Bruck]

So my little brother got a 30gb ipod for christmas, seems like overkill, but whatever. Well he happens to have as many as 59 copies of each song in his library and its the most diorganized mess i've ever seen.

His ipod has like 50 different songs, but it contains 10 to 50 copies of each of those songs. I need to teach him to only download 1 song at a time.....

Is there a program that will clean up his library?

[brachiator]

I don't know about a program do clean it up, but why not just list the library by song title and then delete all the dupes of each song? With only 50 songs, this should not take too long...

Or do the dupes all have different ID4 tags? Are you searching for a program that will remove dupes by file content, rather than tags or filename???

[velodev]

All I can suggest is if you have access to a PC (*gasp*), try downloading ephPod.

There is some pretty nice functionality for maintenance.

Otherwise, do a search for iTunes scripts. I found this site by searching for "swap artist with composer script itunes" and found it.

There is a dupes script, but I have yet to try it.

[dtriska]

I'd sit him down and make him go through his library to weed out the duplicates. He'll thank you later when his library hits a few thousand songs.

[spatterson]

Originally posted by dtriska:
I'd sit him down and make him go through his library to weed out the duplicates. He'll thank you later when his library hits a few thousand songs.

I have to agree. Go into the library and start weeding out all the unnessery songs. I went as far as puting all my downloaded mp3's on dvd's packing them away becuase they were so awful to look at. They were easy to play with on my PC because I used winamp. But now that I use an Apple as my primary computer, I have started digitizing all my cd's and my library is nice a pretty.

If your little bro wants to keep all his songs he can edit the id3 tags. Just click and edit in the empty spaces in the library. That may be a easier way. But this is the price for downloading music, crappy id3 tags.

[Big Mac]

I've been looking for a program that would provide such functionality. iTunes really should assist in the process by providing some sort of "Find Duplicate Tracks" command that would compare ID4 tags and create a list of possible duplicates.

[stevek]

I too have a need to be able to do this on a larger scale (think 3000+ songs). There are Applescripts out there to remove duplicate songs out of playlists but not from the Library (the scripts actually use the LibraryID of each song to determine if there are multiple instances of that ID in the playlist it's checking for duplicates, so using it on the Library simply wouldn't work). I've done some experimenting with using the song filename and path to determine duplicates in the Library but my script takes forever and a day to run.

My music library resides on a network share and my iTunes library is on my powerbook, so the easiest way for me to make sure I have all the latest music imported into iTunes is to drag the music folder into iTunes... which as a result gives me duplicate library entries for all the songs I already have (true, emptying out the library would solve this problem, but song ratings/play counts would disappear so this isn't really a solution).

If there was a $5 shareware app that would provide this functionality of importing any new music files placed in a certain folder into the iTunes library (and possibly handle regular library backups and imports as a scheduled task), would anyone be interested in it? I'm trying to bug my roommate into writing this in C++ because writing this using Applescript isn't really possible (as far as I know) because Finder is not fully scriptable yet.

Any ideas or suggestions for this? Another feature that could be a part of this iTunes helper app could be something that handles removing of duplicate songs in the library, also... although some input on that feature might be helpful too.

steve
[edit]I've also posted this idea up on iPodlounge, but it's not quite as active over there as it is here so I thought I'd post it here...[/edit]

[Sharky K.]

a very nice tip from macosxhints.com is to sort by time
time sort tip

[Big Mac]

Good tip for sorting by track time. . . In regard to your post, stevek, it occurs to me that you should be instructing iTunes to load the library from your server by setting the iTunes Music Folder preference. It sounds like you're using a local copy of your music library when you really only need to access your server. Please disregard this suggestion if I've missed something obvious about your particular configuration.

[stevek]

hmm I can't remember if I've tried that... something about it seems a little too simple . I'll give it a shot once I get home... for some reason I thought there was something weird about the music folder being set to a network share. I might be overlooking something too. Hopefully it's that easy a fix

[stevek]

Tried setting location of music library to the music share but that didn't work... still trying to figure this one out.

[dtriska]

What do you mean it didn't work? It should work just fine. Once the share's folder is set as iTunes' Music Folder, you simply need to re-add the entire folder to iTunes periodically, and iTunes will add only the new songs to your Library.

[stevek]

Are you sure about that? Because that's what I had originally done... just drag the entire music folder from the network share onto iTunes to make sure I had all the latest songs. What it would do though is make duplicate entries in the library for all the songs I already had. I'm currently using iTunes with my music library pointing to the network share but I still had to drag in all the songs manually... I'll try it again once we have some new music to import but I get the feeling that it will still make those duplicate entries in the library like it always has for me