iTune, uTune, duplicateTunes?

Plugging in...

iTunes can, on occasion, make the audiophile downright irritable when the music library shows duplicates of their songs.

Once upon a time... a hard drive crashed. Don't cry yet, the adult in the household had previously made a copy of ALL the music. Phew. The owner of the music, a teenager, was pleased as punch that the money spent at the Apple Store was not in vain. The adult was the "hero" of the moment.

Suffice it to say, that although the music was backed up, the irritable teenager ended up with duplicates of every piece of music on the iPod and in the music library on the computer. Grrr and worse were uttered. You can imagine.

There were two solutions to this problem, one time consuming if there were many songs and their duplicates to address. The other? Slick, and quick. One could delete every duplicate by marking each one, then deleting them as a group. However, and this is a bigee, one of the songs played, the other didn't. So, each song had to be opened to see if it would play before deleting the offending song. Score one for mega time consuming - there were over a thousand songs. More muttering from the teenager.

Slick and quick works IF there is a clean backup (no duplicates) of all the songs, in another folder, or on an external drive such as a flash or hard drive. That we had. So, into the music library we went via iTunes and quickly deleted every song. We then closed iTunes and copied the music from the external source to the computer. When iTunes was opened, it politely asked if it should locate ALL music files on the PC. Why, YES, we answered, what a concept!

Within seconds a clean, no duplicates music library was restored. Happy ending.

ALWAYS REMEMBER: before calling for help - is it plugged in, are the SONGS backed up, and is it turned on?

Unplugged