David Cox: Hey folks.
If your music library is cluttered with duplicates,
then this is the video for you.
You won't need any third party software, but you will need
your computer for this one.
That's coming up next on Tech Talk America.
Hey folks, and welcome to the class today.
I'm gonna teach you a few simple tricks to help you clean duplicate
songs out of your music library.
There are essentially three parts to this process.
The first thing I'm gonna do is have you change a few little settings that'll
make it easier for you to decide which track to keep and which to delete.
Then we're gonna scan for exact duplicates.
That would be songs that are in fact the same identical track.
And once we clean those out, then we're gonna scan for a different type of
duplicate where the tracks are similar, although technically not identical.
For example, many artists, these days release a track as a single,
and then include that with other songs that make up the album.
Without any further ado, let's begin the class and switch to my Mac.
If you're following along at home, I want you to go into the Music app and
make sure that you're clicked on where it says songs here on the left hand side.
At this point, I want you to secondary click AKA right
click into this bar at the top.
And we're gonna add a few attributes that you probably have turned off of
all the items you see in this list, the only ones that you need to make
sure are turned on for this process are artist, track name, time, album bit rate,
cloud download, cloud status, and kind.
Now that we have those attributes turned on, you might want to
take a moment to uncheck anything that you don't care about.
You can drag and drop these columns in whatever order you want, but for this
process, I'd like you to make sure that title is on the left, followed
by time, artist, cloud status, cloud download bit rate, album, and kind.
At this point, let's hunt down all of the exact duplicates to do that.
Let's go to the file menu at the top and hover over where it says library.
You see right here, how it says show duplicate items.
We'll check this out.
When you hold down the option key on your keyboard, that menu item
changes to show exact duplicate items.
Let's now click on that.
At this point, we can go through this list and for every duplicate track,
I'm gonna remove one of them by selecting it and tapping the delete key.
This of course begs the obvious question, which do you keep,
and which do you remove?
The other obvious question is why do so many of these tracks show
no data when it comes to bit rate?
To answer the second question first, to see bitrate data, the
song does need to be downloaded.
So what I want you to do is click on this cloud icon so that it sorts
duplicates based on which files are local.
If you see any items in this list that do not have a check mark in this space,
I want you to select all of those tracks.
Which I'll do now by clicking on the first, holding the shift key on my
keyboard and then click the last track.
Now I'm going to secondary click and select download.
As you can see here, that information is now starting to appear before we
go any further, I need to clarify something, the decision about which
track to keep and which to remove will be different for everyone.
For example, let's say you don't have a lot of free space on your
computer, or maybe you just don't care about high quality audio.
That's okay.
For you, you might want to go with the lower quality file and delete the higher
quality version, which inevitably is gonna be taking up more space for me personally.
I love my AirPod pros and every time I buy a new computer, I make sure that
I have plenty of hard drive space.
So just understand that for me, I'm gonna go with the higher quality file, but
I'm acknowledging at the same time that that might not be the best solution for.
Now let's go back to the file menu.
And once again, let's hover over library, but this time we are gonna click on
where it says show duplicate items.
The first thing we need to do is once again, download any
tracks that are not local.
So I'll sort this list by cloud downloads, select the tracks that are not local
secondary click and select download.
Just like before, as those tracks download, the bit rate
data will become visible.
As you can see here, pretty much all of my tracks show a bit
rate of 256 kilobits per second.
But in your case, you may discover that one of the duplicates is more or less
than that number, the larger, the number is the higher quality of the audio.
Let's now analyze a few similar duplicates together.
So you can start to understand the process.
I'll now click on the column that says title.
Let's start with the song.
Boys will be boys by Dua Lipa.
As you can see, both tracks are coming from Apple Music, but if
one of them showed as purchased.
I would keep the purchased version and delete the version from Apple Music.
The reason why is because if I ever stop subscribing to Apple Music, I
won't be able to play the version that's coming from that source.
So in general, if you see one that says purchased and the other says
Apple Music, I recommend that you remove the Apple Music version.
Because these both are coming from Apple Music.
I'm gonna need a bit more information.
So what I'm gonna do at this point is press command and the letter I, as
in igloo on my keyboard, windows, PC users, I believe it's control I, but
I'm not a hundred percent positive.
And I'm gonna click on the file tab here at the top.
Right?
If you look at the bottom left of this window, you will see two arrows,
which allows me to pull up info for the previous track or the next track.
So when I'm doing this process with clients, I always keep this window open
and flip back and forth between tracks.
That is if the info that's visible in the columns, doesn't do the trick.
In this case, there is an ever so slight difference in the file size.
And that's because one is from the original album and the
other is from a deluxe album.
So in this case, I'd probably delete the original and keep the deluxe version.
Let's move on to another example here, we have two tracks with the same name,
but one is two minutes, 58 seconds.
And the other is three minutes and seven seconds.
In this case, one is a studio recording and the other is from a live performance.
So in this case, I probably wouldn't delete either of them.
If you look here at fresh eyes by Andy Grammer this is another example
where one track is the version that was released as a single.
And the other is from an album that later followed.
The only difference is one version is one second longer than the other.
So it really doesn't matter which one you keep.
I'd say, keep the one that has the better cover art, but
basically they're the same file.
If you're new to Apple Music, or if you just find it confusing, you might
wanna consider checking out my video entitled how to switch to Apple Music.
That video also covers the process of exporting your playlist from
other music apps like Spotify, so that they appear in the music.
Before we go.
I'd like to share one more trick with you.
Granted, this is slightly off topic, but I've received this question
three times in the last week.
So I'm gonna take it as a sign.
That question is how do I find out the total number of songs in my music library?
The answer is there's a simple toolbar that you probably, at
some point accidentally turned off, just go into the view menu.
And then here at the bottom, you'll see an option to turn on status bar.
And when I turn it on, you'll find that number here at the bottom of the window.
If you have any questions that didn't get answered in this class, or if you
just want to learn how to better use your Mac, iPhone or iPad, then you
can sign up for a little one hour tech therapy session with myself right through
my website at tech talk, america.com.
It's all conducted over zoom.
The entire session is recorded and of course there are no stupid questions.
Thank you so much for watching everyone.
This is David A Cox with Tech Talk America.
Class dismissed.