iTunes ‘remove duplicates’ feature – is it any use?
On the face of it, the iTunes ‘remove duplicates’ feature sounds like a great idea as you may well have the same track on an artist’s album, a greatest hits album and a ‘various’ compilation album and this is needlessly taking up space on your hard drive. Unfortunately, the feature is rather crude as using it means that two of your albums will now be missing tracks when you come to listen to them as an album (yes people still do that sometimes).
A much more intelligent functionality (Apple please consider implementing this) would be for iTunes to discard two of the files (thereby saving space) but re-link the remaining file to all occurrences of that track in your library. Without this, the feature is next to useless.
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I’m not aware of a remove duplicate feature but there is a way to “Show Exact Duplicates”. iTunes also has an option to “Show Exact Duplicates” meaning you don’t have to download anything or pay for anything to properly delete you duplicates. Check out how here: http://www.dagaza.com/2010/03/delete-duplicates-in-itunes/
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Yes, it should read ’show duplicates’ rather than ‘remove duplicates’. It would seem that it is only really useful for removing identical copies of tracks, of which I had only a handful.
As you say in your blog post, duplicated tracks on multiple albums actually belong there, but it would be useful to reduce space used if these could be consolidated.