Why does my songs doubled on itunes

Adding music from multiple sources, restoring from backups, copying songs from old CDs, merging with family members, it's pretty much inevitable that as your music library grows so do the number of problems that will creep in. The biggest problem most people encounter are duplicate songs hiding in every corner of their collection. Apple has included basic functionality in iTunes to track down duplicates. In the resulting list, by default song names and artist names must be exactly the same in order for the songs to be listed as duplicates.

You can also hold down a modifier key alt on Mac, Shift on Windows when selecting this command in order to require that album names also be the same to be considered a duplicate. After you get the above type of list, now you decide which duplicate songs you want to delete and then select and delete them one by one. You'll likely want to ensure that iTunes is displaying columns for useful information to help you decide which tracks to keep and which to delete, such as the Time and Plays columns.

For more specifics, you can read the official Apple page about using this feature in iTunes to remove duplicate items in your music library. One common misconception is you might delete some duplicates but still see them in Apple Music. That could be because the song is actually in the cloud and not downloaded on your Mac. Getting rid of all of your duplicated music can be really simple and fast with the help of Gemini 2. The best part is that you can download and try Gemini 2 for free.

After you have Gemini 2 downloaded , follow these steps to scan for duplicate music files:. That will show you everything the Music app thinks is a duplicate. But you can sort it by exact duplicates, which helps take some of the guesswork out of it. To show exact duplicates, follow the steps above, but when you get to step 2, hold down the option key on your keyboard the entire time. Once you find all the duplicates in Apple Music, you might be wondering how you can quickly differentiate them.

Here are a couple of tips that will help you figure out which one to keep without having to listen to each track. Sorting the list by Date Added may make it easier to select the appropriate tracks particularly if used immediately after the dupes have been created.

If you don't see duplicates that you expect to see then it may be that minor differences exist such as a disc count of 1 in one copy of album which has a blank disc count in another, or there are two alternate versions of a band's name.

Ensuring that you tag your albums in a consistent fashion will make it easier to spot and then remove duplicates. Use my DeDuper script Windows only if you're not sure, don't want to do tackle deduplicating by hand, or want to preserve ratings, play counts and playlist membership. See this thread for background on the script, this post for detailed instructions, and please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping.

The most recent version of the script can tidy dead links as long as there is at least one live duplicate to merge stats and playlist membership to, and should cope sensibly when the same file has been added via multiple paths.

Mac users can try Dupin from Doug's Scripts.