rashbre central: in which I discover I have 10 days worth of iTunes duplicate tracks

Wednesday, 1 July 2015

in which I discover I have 10 days worth of iTunes duplicate tracks


I seldom look at the inner workings of things like iTunes, but following its recent change I decided to press a few of the control buttons.

The one that surprised me was 'View Duplicates', which showed me the various duplicates that have piled up inside iTunes over the years.

A quick peek at the total running time of just the duplicates is - gulp - 10 days, 21 hours, 12 minutes and thirty three seconds. That's 3769 tracks and takes 20Gb of disk.

Randomly I noticed that I had 37 variations of remixes of Bjork's 'Army of Me', for example. Worryingly, they are also often of different lengths.

I haven't started chopping any out yet, because in some cases there's a difference between, say, a live version and an album cut. And what about when a track is also part of a compilation? Should I keep both versions?

I've also tried that 'View/Show Exact Duplicates' - which cuts the number down to 825 tracks (2 days worth), but for example still lists a 2:57 track and a 5:42 track as exact duplicates.

Maybe I'll just pretend I never pressed the button.

Decisions, decisions.

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