Itunes question
 

I'm not sure what i did but I now have something on the order of 5500 duplicates in my Itunes library. Is there an easy way to remove them? Both copies point to the same directory so I dont think it matters which is deleted.
I started going through and selecting them one by one but soon realized it would take forever.

Should I wipe out Itunes completely and start again?
Any suggestions would be qppreciated

Dan

I'm far from an expert, but if I were you, I'd first look at what's in the iTunes Music folder (C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music) and see if there were any duplicate folders that could be easily deleted.

If not, I'd be very tempted to just download whatever music files are on my iPod into that folder (after deleting what's there now), and seeing what happens.

Of course, I'm assuming you have only music files.

http://www.google.com/search?q=itunes+remove+duplicates

Specifically,
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1417
and
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1579/...edia_library_/

Might be as easy as setting the order of songs by Date Added or Date Modified and deleting anything from the date in question. Surely the duplicate will have a new Date Added date.

If that column is not in your iTunes display, right click on the bar at the top with the column names and add the Date Added column, then click it to order things by that, and away you go.

Mike

This happened to me as well and it was because I had Windows Media Center set as my default (as well as auto converting all files into .wma) so itunes automatically converts all .wma files and the original .mp3 files when it moves them into itunes. It sees each file as a different song. You'll have to delete all your .wma files to that future itune imports won't do this again and then go into itunes and do a search function and manually delete all duplicates. Or store your backups on a completely different HD.

Also disable Windows as your default and go into Windows and uncheck the box that says auto convert to .wma, just leave everything in .mp3 and let itunes deal with the rest.

This is all assuming you have Windows. If you have a Mac, you probably still have multiple file formats of the same song stored somewhere (I'm not sure where exactly) and you'll have to find those and delete them or move them into another HD completely so itunes doesn't "see" 2.

Thanks for all the help. I believe TCL hit it, I didn't have itunes as the default music player so I think it did exactly as he/she said.

PS yes it is a Windows machine