OK, off and on, I’m going to be working at cleaning up my iTunes library. Over the years it’s had a few disasters that I never fully recovered from. The first was my attempt to sync my home and work iTunes via rsync. Unfortunately I forgot that as I modify files by changing names or other tags that this would result in rsync seeing “a new file.” Thus I ended up with lots of unwanted copies – most of which I caught but a few of which persist. I also many years ago made the mistake of running a program that would supposedly fill in the album information for most tracks. Unfortunately it really screwed up the file names for many tracks.
Anyway I wanted to start with the finding of duplicates. Now you could use a program like fdupes or dupes.py (discussed a few weeks ago). Those aren’t ideal. In the past I’ve used Doug’s Applescripts. He has several useful scripts. One is Remove Dead Tracks which gets those entries where the file is long gone. (I don’t know how that happens – it’s usually stuff I don’t want anyway) His other famous script is Corral iTunes Dupes which I’ve used in the past to find duplicate tracks.
Some other useful scripts find tracks with the same name. Those usually aren’t duplicates (they may be live versions of the songs, for instance) but it’s useful to find them and check.
I suspect a few of these I’ll want to roll into Python and then modify for my own purposes.
One thing I’ve discovered is that the author of all these very useful scripts has a new application out called Dupin. It looks like it was written in Obj-C and probably creates a slightly more robust database for finding duplications.
I’ve tried it. It works very well. Basically it lists all the duplicated files. You can then apply various filters to “check mark” the files (which decides which ones are your keepers). It looks like most of mine were from a playlist a friend had sent of recent indie music that I’d somehow imported several times.
Overall it shows a lot of elegance for such a program. Most of my scripts are definitely hacks. (i.e. little error handling or grace) That’s because I know what they are doing. But this is designed for the end user. But I must say it performs amazingly.
One of its nicer features is to limit the number of duplicates. That way if you have 2 or 3 minutes while waiting for something to compile, print or the like you can make a dent in your duplicates without feeling overwhelmed.
So I heartily recommend the program to everyone. Getting rid of duplicates is always the best first step in getting iTunes cleaned up.
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