Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Further Narrow Down Duplicates in iTunes with the Option Key [ITunes]

Further Narrow Down Duplicates in iTunes with the Option Key [ITunes]

Further Narrow Down Duplicates in iTunes with the Option KeyWe've mentioned iTunes' "show duplicates" feature a few times before, but on its own, you might still have to sift through a lot of songs. With the ever-useful Option key, however, you can narrow down those results to show exact duplicates only.

The problem with iTunes' default "show duplicates" feature (for some) is that it shows anything that might be construed as a duplicate—which means live tracks, bootlegs, alternate recordings, or tracks that show up on compliation albums are all shown as duplicates even if they're different tracks. This means you'll narrow down your choices, but it'll still be a lot to sift through, especially if you have a big library. Reader Sikstik, though, shows us how to narrow the search for duplicates down to exact duplicates only:

To see all Exact Duplicates in iTunes, Click File from the iTunes menu and then hold down the Option key. Display Duplicates should now change to Display Exact Duplicates, which should result in a shorter list of duplicates.

If you're on Windows, you can do the same thing by pressing the Shift key instead of Option. This feature may have been there for awhile, but we hadn't seen it before, so we thought we'd share. It's just another example of the great features that Option key keeps hidden away for you.

[via #tips]