Dupe Eliminator for iTunes 8.1
If you are anything like me you will have thousands of music tracks in a variety of formats on your machine. With reformatting and having to setup your iTunes library again you sometimes find you end up with duplicates and those smart playlists don’t provide a way for you to be able to distinguish them. You can of course use the built-in ‘Show Duplicates’ option, but what happens when you happen to have thousands of duplicates?
I didn’t feel like clicking a couple of thousand times so I looked for an automated solution. I am running my iTunes on a windows machine and so could not make use of the many AppleScripts and Mac only versions of many pieces of software. I was also concerned about using an automated script as I didn’t want to lose my purchased tracks and have it delete the wrong ones.
Step in Dupe Eliminator for iTunes. I was able to download this software and use it in a trial capacity, although I couldn’t see that option being listed on the website – it was only from other reviews and comments that I knew this. The trial seems fully-fledged but does only allow you to remove three tracks. There is a very comprehensive set of criteria on which you can base the selections with varying options on how or whether to delete differing aspects. You can state what you want to do with the files and links and under which criteria you would like to consider the primary track – I selected Protected AAC so as not to lose anything I had paid for.
The software lets you select different libraries and playlists, the interface is very clean and uncluttered and the software is intuitive to use. I genuinely feel that all the features incorporated into this software should be a part of iTunes as standard.
Key Features of Dupe Eliminator include:
* Smart Search: Smart searching allows you to precisely specify criteria for duplicates so that you never end up deleting something you wanted to save.
* AutoClean Mode: Automatically clean your iTunes library without lifting so much as a finger.
* Scheduled Search: Define a schedule for Dupe Eliminator to check your iTunes library when your at work, sleeping… whenever you want.
* Audiobook Support: Eliminate your audiobook dupes.
* Dead Tracks Eliminator: Get rid of those pesky tracks that never seem to play, as well as the “phantom” tracks that show up in your library but don’t actually exist on your hard drive.
* Determine what you want to keep: Like having more than one track of a certain song? You can keep whatever you like, and you can specify which file stays as the original and which one is marked as the duplicate.
* UnDelete: If you make a mistake, then use UnDelete to restore the removed track(s) back to iTunes.
