Sunday, July 20, 2008

A little trouble in MacParadise....

I go on and on about my beloved MacBook. Well, I have finally found something not quite right. It's not the laptop itself - it's iTunes. I never really was a fan of iTunes just from hearing what other users said about it. But to be fair, I never used it before buying my MacBook, so I had to at least give it a try. I've been using it for about a year and just recently noticed that there are some songs missing from my collection - not everything I have stored on my PC is in iTunes on my MacBook. This is odd, because I'm sure I copied everything over. But stuff is indeed missing, so I decided to wipe the slate and start over. I deleted the iTunes library (or so I thought) and deleted the music files. I never did bother to see if the missing songs were just missing from the iTunes library, or if the actual music files were missing. In hindsight, that was a mistake. But on adding the whole mp3 collection back into iTunes, I noticed something quite annoying - my library was now showing duplicate entries - all the songs I had before were now showing up twice. Total suckage. I'm sure I deleted the library, but somehow iTunes resurrected a spare copy.

So after adding my entire mp3 collection into iTunes, my library showed a total of 1200 songs more than I had files, meaning I had a lot of duplicates. A little Googling showed that this is an inherent flaw with iTunes. So common that folks have taken to writing their own scripts to help users deal with duplicates in iTunes. I downloaded Dupin, a manager that offers to find and delete duplicates based on various criteria. Although the non-paid version only lets you manage 20 duplicates at a time, I managed to get rid of mine in 30 or so minutes.

Here's hoping Apple recognizes this common problem with iTunes and offers to add duplicates management in a future release of the program.

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