A lot of times when we are adding songs to our beloved iTunes, we don’t have time or patience to load songs individually so we just add the whole music folder, causing iTunes to load duplicates of the same song. Several friends have asked me if there is a way to removed duplicate tracks from an iTunes library. Jeff Story of treeratfishing.com thankfully already had a script made that does this job for us.

To do this, simply download the Visual Basic Script from here and save it first, then run it from your machine. The original script would not let you know it was running until it finished. One way to be sure or to check on it is to navigate to your iTunes main music library and watch the statistical information at the bottom of the window. If this script is still running you will see the total songs decrease. Once the script has finished it will give you a pop-up alert telling you it is finished. I have also modified the version downloaded from my site to alert you that the script is starting to make life easier.

I usually run this two or three times just to make sure it gets all the duplicates and even triplicates (is this a word?).

Another issue with iTunes is that when we download music from an application other than iTunes, a lot of times we have to manually add the music to our iTunes library. I am in the process of creating a script that will add any new songs found in a specified folder to the iTunes music library, and this will also help make life easier as well as stop us from loading all these duplicates. In addition I also have a SourceForge project open for this script which you can find here. There isn’t much there now since it isn’t finished but just FYI.