All my iTunes songs are duplicated!

If there’s one thing iTunes is good at, it’s making a royal mess of your music library. Huge libraries are often crippled by multiple copies of the same albums or songs. There are two ways to deal with the clones.

If you have a small library, consider using iTunes’ duplicate finder, which is at least efficient at finding them. For libraries over 20 gigs or so, Rinse will be much faster.

The first is less precise, but it’s also free. From iTunes, go to File > Display Duplicates or hold Option and click Display Exact Duplicates. From there, you can delete duplicates from the list by holding Command and clicking the dupes to select them, then pressing Option-Delete to kick them out of your library. Unfortunately, the songs and artists are often intermingled with each other, which makes the process gruelingly slow if you’re dealing with large libraries.

Thankfully, third-party applications can make this dupe-nuking easier. If you’re not afraid to spend $40 on an iTunes utility, Rinse is an awesome tool that won’t just remove dupes but will also find missing cover art, correct genres, and fix misspellings. To use it, simply run the app and click Add Album Art, Find Duplicates, Fix Your Songs, or Organize Genres.