Whether you're a composer, DJ, or music enthusiast, it's easy to accumulate duplicate music tracks on your computer when copying music, moving files, downloading music, or modifying playlists. Finding and managing these duplicates manually can be tedious and time-consuming.
Luckily, help is at hand in the shape of duplicate song remover software - Duplicate Sweeper, available for both Windows and Mac. This duplicate fixer can scan your computer for duplicate music, photos and other files. Once you have a list of all your duplicates, you can even let Duplicate Sweeper select the best files to keep based on your preferences. You'll save lots of time and effort, and ultimately gain buckets of space back on your computer!
Step 1 - Download Duplicate Sweeper on your computer...
Duplicate Sweeper is available as a free download for Windows and Mac. You can scan your computer for duplicate files (music, documents, photos etc.) completely free of charge. To remove your duplicates, you'll need the full version of the program.
Step 2 - Add folders to scan for duplicate music...
Select which folders you'd like Duplicate Sweeper to search for duplicates in. You can easily add folders, drag and drop them, or use convenient checkboxes to automatically select popular folders like Music, Documents, and Pictures.
You can even expand your search to external drives and cloud storage services. For more details, check out these articles:
Duplicate Sweeper - Find duplicate music on your Mac and PC
Step 3 - Review the results and select what to keep...
Duplicate Sweeper will display all the duplicate songs found in your selected folders. The duplicates are ordered by total file size - so you can see which groups are taking up the most disk space on your computer.
For each group of duplicates, Duplicate Sweeper shows the number of files duplicated and how many files you have selected to delete. In the example here, the file "Hymn For The Weekend.m4a" has been found 4 times! Three of these files have been marked to be deleted (shown in red).
For each duplicate set, you can automatically select to keep the newest or oldest file. This selection can be made on individual groups of files, for file types or for all the duplicate groups found.
If you're not sure which track to keep, you can listen to each file in Duplicate Sweepers preview panel. Of course, all the files in a duplicate group should be the same!
Step 4 - Confirm and Remove Duplicates
Duplicate Song Remover- Click 'Recycle Selected Duplicates'.
Duplicate Sweeper will now list all the songs you have selected to remove.
When you have reviewed your duplicate selections, clicking the "Recycle Duplicates" button will move all the chosen files to your Recycle Bin (or Trash Can on Mac). You can recover files from the Recycle bin or Trash Can if you have made a mistake. Please be advised that the full version of Duplicate Sweeper is required for the software to delete the duplicates based on your preferences.
Final Note: At this point, the duplicate songs are still stored on your computer, so disk space has not yet been retaken. To fully remove the duplicate files from your computer, you'll need to clear them from your Recycle Bin on your desktop (or Trash Can on Mac). Make sure that you are confident that you don't need these files again, as once they are removed from the recycle bin, you will not be able to restore them to your computer.
Duplicate Sweeper - Delete duplicate music on your computer
Deleting Duplicate Songs in Your iTunes or Mac Music Library
The steps above detail how to find and remove duplicate music from your computer and other drives. During this process, tracks are identified and removed from wherever the drive you chose to scan for duplicates.
However, if you simply delete songs from your computer, the files will be gone, but the track entry will not be removed from your iTunes/Music library (i.e. iTunes will still reference them). This will result in iTunes or Mac Music warning that it cannot find these missing tracks on your computer.
As Duplicate Sweeper is designed for files, photos, music and more on computers and drives, it does not interact with music management programs like iTunes in a way that prevents this issue.
If your goal is to clean up your iTunes or Mac Music library, we recommend instead using our Tune Sweeper program.
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