4 Comments

The UNIX Way of Removing iTunes Duplicate Songs

After recovering from a horrific NAS crash (Kids, trust me… Use RAID 5 instead of RAID 0) my iTunes library has some duplicate songs. Now instead of filtering through them by hand, Adam Kalsey has pointed out a simple UNIX utility called Duff can compare files based on their name and file sizes.

I sent Duff’s output to a text file with the command

duff -r /Volumes/music/ > duplicatemusic.txt

Once Duff was done running, I ran a short command to grab all the lines from the output that end in 1.mp3 and delete them.

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  • http://outlookexpressed.com Matt J

    What’s wrong with View>Show Duplicates within iTunes?

  • http://www.uneasysilence.com Dan

    Gives wayyyyyyy too many false positives.

  • http://outlookexpressed.com Matt J

    Well I haven’t really used ‘Show Duplicates’, so I wasn’t aware of that.

  • http://kalsey.com/ Adam Kalsey

    Show Duplicates also only shows the duplicates. If you have hundreds or thousands, it’s a chore to remove them one by one.

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