Matching your music library can leave a bit of a mess in the aftermath. In iTunes, select File > Duplicates and you’ll see quite a few tracks appear again and again. In some cases it’s because you already have music ripped at higher bitrates, so, for example, if you’ve been ripping MP3s at 320Kbps iTunes Match will give you 256Kbps AAC files instead. Click View > View Options and check the Bit Rate box to see which is which.
Sometimes the same songs tend to pop up in multiple albums, too: for example, Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road appears on "Born to Run" as well as on countless hits compilations, so if you’re a big fan of his you’ve probably got multiple copies of that particular song. If you’d rather free up some disk space you can safely delete all but one copy, but just make sure you say no when iTunes asks if you’d also like to delete the file(s) from iCloud.
If you have lots of high-bitrate MP3 files already, iTunes Match will create duplicates in AAC format.
Marcus-B
May 31, 2012 at 3:10am
You're right, iTunes match has been a bit of a disappointment. I've ended up with thousands of duplicates after using it. I found that removing these manually in iTunes would have taken me hours, so I found this app called Tune Sweeper, which removed a lot of duplicates automatically very quickly.
Georgios
March 20, 2012 at 6:34am
I have since stopped using iTunes match and am pleased with a small iTunes cleanup utility called CopyTrans TuneTastic which helped me delete iTunes duplicates.
The problem with iTunes Match when I started using it was that it would not receive two identical songs form a compilation album and an album associated with the artist. I.e. Billie Jean by Michael Jackson Gold and the same song but from the original Thriller album.
