Initially we all had just one Mac and one iPod. We’d dutifully sync our iPod with our Mac, and life was grand.
Then we got a MacBook, another iPod, and finally, an iPhone. Soon it was apparent that our music library was scattered across multiple machines and the idea of trying to figure out which machine had which songs became an onerous task. So we just threw them all together, resulting in tons of unwanted duplicate tracks.
Even without Foreigner, we had double vision--but that was before Dupin cleaned up the duplicates in our iTunes library.
Dupin scours your iTunes library for duplicates and helps cure you of double-track syndrome. iTunes contains a Show Duplicates feature, but it’s woefully underpowered. It works fine for a couple tracks, but music fans with larger libraries will by stymied by its extremely limited definition of “duplicate.” Dupin turbocharges the process, making it easier to find actual duplicates--as opposed to different versions of the same song. With 10 selectable criteria for defining duplicates and the ability to confine searches by playlist or specific library, there are few rogue tracks that can escape Dupin. iTunes doesn’t have to be open for the application to do its thing, and, in fact, you can continue listening to iTunes music without fear of interruption from Dupin.
Once the dupes are identified, you can set filters for the application to determine which files to keep in your iTunes library and which to purge (keeping higher-bit rate versions and tossing lower-quality copies, for example). We threw multiple songs with the same name, songs stored on different devices, and songs with varying bit rates at Dupin, and it was able to reliably separate the keepers from the unnecessary duplicates.
You can tell Dupin to simply remove the tracks from your iTunes library without deleting them, send them to the Trash, or have them deleted on the spot. We recommend hanging on to them, but we wish Dupin gave us the option to move the files to a specific folder--which would reduce the size of our Music folder while still giving us the chance to back up the duplicate files. Purged tracks that are sent to the Trash can be manually recovered, but you lose the Artist/Album folder nesting that iTunes creates, leaving an organizational nightmare.
Robust criteria for finding and purgin duplicate tracks. Universal binary.
No option to send duplicates to another destination within their nested folders.
