I love 80's music. During that time in my life, I bought a bunch of CDs (Erasure, The Smiths, INXS, etc) and have since ripped them. Every now and again, I will still come across a really cool 80's compilation CD that will have a bunch of songs that remind me of that era. Usually, I will already have one or two of the songs that are on the CD, but when I rip, I always forget to uncheck those songs before importing them into my Library. Over time, those duplicates can start to build up.

Trying to find and eliminate those duplicate songs manually would take hours of your time, especially if you have a large Library. Fortunately, iTunes has a built-in feature to make this process a lot quicker.

To search for duplicate songs, open iTunes and click on your Library on the left. Then go to Edit | Show Duplicate Songs. This will show you all songs that are duplicated, and group them together. It will look something like this:

If we focus on the first two results ("A Little Respect"), you will notice that they are both titled the same, and have the same artist, but everything else is different (including length). There are several reasons for this... one may be a live-audience version, they are mastered by two different record labels, etc.

At this point, you simply want to listen to the songs to compare, and if they really are duplicates (be aware, sometimes they may look like duplicates, but can be different), feel free to delete one. I actually preferred the sound quality from the "Pop!..." album, so I removed the other one.

By running this, I was able to remove about 80 songs (of 2,746). Not earth-shattering, but every duplicate song does take up hard drive space! 80 songs in my case saved me about 240 MB of disk space.