Listening to songs is an addiction for many these days. People of all ages, with a wide variety of backgrounds, turn toward listening to their favorite tracks whether they intend to shrug off the tiredness after a long day at work or want to spend a lazy weekend at home.
This job has been simplified for the users by the super-fast Internet as now they can download songs in big quantities. Sounds all good. But the downside of this is the accumulation of duplicate music. A music buff person might well have gathered tens of hundreds (or beyond) of duplicate music on their computer. The solution lies with Clone Files Checker. It is built for killing duplicates of all kinds and does a neat and speedy job of the duplicate hunt mission.
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This has also led to ever greater chances of the creation of duplicates. Users often don’t organize their song collection in File Explorer, which results in cluttered data, songs not being found when they are required etc. This leads us to the conclusion that there must be some methods that can help users quickly do away with any duplicate songs from their collection. The method must be fast, reliable and shan’t be too complex, or else no one will go for it. We’ve done our research and have brought the following methods for our readers’ benefit. Read on!
Duplicates in VLC media player
First up is perhaps the most widely used media player for Windows-based computer systems, the VLC media player. VLC offers an optimized experience to its users and is loved throughout the world for the benefits it offers. It is quite conservative in using system resources also. Let’s look at how we can tackle duplicate songs in VLC.
- Launch VLC media player.
- Press the Ctrl + L shortcut combination to open up the playlists interface.
- Now press Ctrl + Shift + O to add up multiple songs in one go.
- Now click Add to navigate to the folder which contains the songs you want to add.
- Repeat the last step until you’ve added songs from all the folders.
- Now click the Play button.
- Terminate the playback and click the Title column head to sort all the contents of the playlist in alphabetical order.
- Now you will be seeing all the songs as well as their duplicates (bundled next to them).
- Simply right-click a duplicate track and select Show containing folder.
- Now you can open up that particular folder in File Explorer and delete that duplicate.
- Repeat this process until you’ve removed all the duplicates.
Duplicates in iTunes
iTunes saw the light of the day with the iPod and has slowly been transformed into a big player of the market. It even enjoys popularity among Windows users, and completely dominates the Mac user market. Let’s look at how we can scan for and get rid of duplicate music files in iTunes.
- Launch iTunes and press Alt to bring up the menu bar.
- Click Edit | Preferences.
- Select the Advanced section.
- Now make sure the checkboxes for both of these options are selected:
Keep iTunes Media folder organized
Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library - Click File, point to Library and select Show Duplicate Items.
- If you suspect any songs or folders aren’t included here, you can easily add them by pointing to File and choosing between Add File to Library/ Add Folder to Library (as applicable).
- Just like the previous methods, we will suggest you arrange all the items in alphabetical order by clicking the Name column head.
- All that remains to be done is selecting the duplicates and deleting them. Use the left mouse click + Shift Key to select songs in succession, or left mouse click + Ctrl key to select songs in a non-continuous manner.
Duplicates in Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player is the first name that comes to our mind when we talk about playing a media file on a computer because this is how we all used to watch those blockbusters and listen to the latest hits in the ’90s. It is a decent piece of software to play media files and has undergone tremendous improvements. The current version is known as Windows Media Player 12, and comes inbuilt in Windows 10.
- Launch Windows Media Player and click Library.
- Click Organize and select Manage libraries | Music.
- Click Add and select all folders in your computer which contain music.
- Double-click Music | All music.
- Click the Title column head to sort all the files in a name wise manner.
- Now what remains to be done is simply spotting a duplicate music file, right-clicking it and selecting Delete.
- Select the radio box for Delete from library and my computer and then click OK.
All of these methods produce a varying degree of results, but they require some effort on part of the user. Let’s now look at a method that does it all, with minimal human intervention. Also, the results will (always) be picture perfect!
Clone Files Checker
Clone Files Checker is designed to scan, detect and obliterate duplicate files (not just music, but all kinds of files). It has a no-nonsense kind of user interface, requires very little input from the user, and performs its job with an optimum degree of accuracy. You can download it for free from its website.
Once you’ve downloaded and installed it, using Clone Files Checker to kill away all the duplicate songs from your computer is very straightforward.
First, let’s surprise you with an even cool feature before we get to the real deal. Clone Files Checker facilitates users in getting rid of all the dead tracks in iTunes. Dead tracks are those songs that were added in the iTunes Music Library by the user, but later the user deleted them from the computer. However, these songs will continue to sit in the iTunes Music Library in the shape of ‘entries’. This promises to be very irritating to the user when they select a song and find out it can’t be played, and this annoying message keeps on reappearing after a few minutes. To clean up all such dead tracks, select the iTunes Search mode. Next, simply click the blue colored Remove Dead Tracks button and Clone Files Checker will tabulate a list of all dead tracks momentarily for you. Simply click Remove and that’s it!
Simply select Custom | Music to limit the scan to music files only. Once the scan is over and you’ve been provided with results, you can either choose to manually select the files which shall be purged, or you can select from the several criteria available via the Select Duplicates button (retain newest, oldest, most modified, least modified, or by folder location). Next, click the Select Action button and click Permanent Delete to rid yourselves forever of these duplicates.