How to Solve Duplicate File Problem on iTunes

06-14-11: Ncarv
Albert, have you compared Audirvana to Pure Music or Amarra?
Maybe you could update us on a new thread when you figure this all out. I'm anxious to get on with it, but the tinkering is daunting.

I have Pure Music and Amarra, I'm told that Amarra is better but it's harder to implement with an iPad or iPhone with Apple Remote app.

I'm hoping for simple elegance with decent sound when everything is complete and I'm trying hard to get a combination of convenience and high performance. So far I have no idea how this will do, not until the DAC is running and all this is in my system.

Hi Onhwy61, the duplicates do not show the same play count - if I play a music file, just that 'version' shows the additional play count.

Waltersales, thanks for the tip although I think that software is only for the Mac, and I'm using itunes on a PC. Also, I'm really not keen on uploading all my music again as it's quite an undertaking - am hoping to somehow bulk remove the duplicate references. Worst case, I'll just ctrl-c the dupes, which should at least be faster than uploading all my music again.

I'm amazed that aa mature and hugely popular software like itunes can be so flakey. The interface and other features have a lot to be desired too.

I used iTunes for the first year or so while the whole music server thing was in it's early stages. During that time my music library became an unpleasant mess that I am still trying to clean up several years later.

Every time an update came out or some other event occured that would result in a full rescan of my library initiated by itunes, it created doubles and triples of every song I own.

In my opinion if you are just starting to dip your toes into the PC based audio world you may save yourself a whole lot of headache (and hard drive space) later if you use something other then iTunes now.

I have since moved to the squeezebox software and transporter in my setup and being able to control your own folder structure within your music library is a huge advantage that can't be ignored. Duplicates are thing of the past now plus I am not locked into Apples proprietary music format which holds MY music library by the sac

I've been using iTunes since version 1 and have never had a duplicate file problem. I've always run it on a Mac platform and I'm currently using versions 9 and 10. Is the duplication issue something specific to Windows?

It's mandatory to have backups of your iTunes library and music files before implementing a software upgrade. If you cannot undo it, you shouldn't do it.

Go to www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
The software (old DOS interface) has a itunes_remove_duplicates action.

My version 10 generates duplicates all the time

Ken