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The single worst thing about itunes, in my opinion, is the way it handles duplicate songs. It has a "detect duplicates" feature, but all that does is show a li
by knodi123 10y ago
The single worst thing about itunes, in my opinion, is the way it handles duplicate songs. It has a "detect duplicates" feature, but all that does is show a list of groups of songs that it thinks are duplicates, and it has false positives! But the one thing it can't do, is detect when you've added multiple copies of the exact same file in the same directory.
My music collection needs to by synced across computers, and if it refused to add the exact same file twice, then the operation would be trivial. Add mp3s to your music directory, drag and drop all files to itunes, and let it detect new songs. Since it's not, I have to do a long series of "okay, the timestamp on this file is newer than the newest added-on date in itunes.... I think.... except this directory was untarred, so it retains old timestamps, and blah blah blah..."
- labster 10y agofdupes is your friend in cases like these — it finds duplicate files fast. As usual, the CLI tools are much better at solving problems than a terrible GUI like iTunes.
- majewsky 10y agoYou don't even need a separate tool for that: find -type f -name \*.mp3 -exec md5sum {} + \ | uniq -dDw 32
- dangravell 10y agoNot all music files are MP3s. When people mean duplicates, they normally mean duplicate songs, not duplicate files (audio + metadata + headers).
- knodi123 10y agoThe problem isn't duplicate files, it's that iTunes has an internal list of songs, and it allows the same file to appear in the list twice. I can manage a directory of files, I just can't manage iTunes' indexing of them. I understand why you would have assumed this was a file issue, though, because the real problem is the most idiotically stupid thing ever.
- Raphmedia 10y agoIsn't the library simply a big .xml file? I wonder if you could parse it yourself to get rid of the duplicate. I would try but I have a 20k+ songs itunes library and it takes hours to reindex whenever I move anything...
- coredog64 10y agoWouldn't the play count metadata embedded in the file lead to different md5sums?