Queen’s ubiquitous “We Will Rock You” is a tune that will always rock the sixth-inning rally, but when it’s on repeat for 25 minutes because of duplicate copies in your iTunes library, it’s time to do some spring cleaning. iTunes Dupes Barrier helps you quickly seek out and destroy duplicate tracks, and it’s a bit more flexible than iTunes’ built-in functionality.

Once you fire up iTunes Dupes Barrier, the application scans your music for duplicated tracks based on file size and song, artist, and album names. You can choose to create a separate playlist from these tracks for further study in iTunes, or you can also leave the criteria unchecked and select Dead Tracks, which deletes references to tracks that iTunes can no longer find. When your list of duplicates has been compiled, you can select a file and click Delete to chuck duplicate tracks, or you can play it safe and switch over to iTunes. From there, you can listen to the duplicates from the playlist created by Dupes Barrier and make decisions.

iTunes Dupes Barrier gets rid of all those pesky duplicates clogging up your iTunes library.

iTunes itself does come with its own built-in Show Duplicates option, but it only matches on song titles and artist without regard for similar tracks from different albums. For the meticulous digital-music collector, this feature is not as comprehensive as what you’ll get with Dupes Barrier, which can match on any or all of the four criteria. Still, it’s up to you to determine which songs to keep in your library--there’s no way to preview tracks from Dupes Barrier.

Unfortunately, the app provides no support for the Mac’s standard keyboard shortcuts--why couldn’t we wade through the list with the arrow keys and hit Command + Delete? Instead, we had to click the app’s Delete button every time we wanted to remove a song.

According to the developer, iTunes Dupes Barrier was only designed to work with an “average-size” iTunes library, but there’s no clear indication what “average” means. We used it without problems on various libraries ranging from 5GB to well over 12GB.

For quick maintenance on your music library, iTunes Dupes Barrier will get the job done, but other more full-featured solutions like Dupin are available if you need more dupe-nuking firepower.

iTunes Dupes Barrier
COMPANY: Hyperbolic Software
CONTACT: www.hyperbolicsoftware.com
PRICE: $10
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later
Displays duplicated music files and locations. One-click delete. A bit more flexible than iTunes' built-in Show Duplicates function. Universal binary.
Annoying interface. Doesn't preview tracks to help you decide which copy to delete.