Clean up your Music library with these top tips for the Mac app
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HOW TO DO ANYTHING ON YOUR MAC, iPHONE & iPAD
NO MATTER HOW carefully you curate your music collection, you’re bound to end up with all kinds of duplicates —and it’s not your fault! Artists often release songs first as singles and then on albums, before they eventually turn up on greatest hits collections, movie soundtracks and chart hits compilations. And then there are the live versions, recordings made specially for radio broadcasts, and all those ones that have popped up on the Apple Music playlists you’ve downloaded.
If you’re getting tired of having 17 different versions of the same Ed Sheeran song on your Mac, iPhone and iPad, we sympathize —and we’re here to help!
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to identify duplicate tracks in the Music app for Mac, how to remove them or mark them as superfluous, and how to preserve the
versions you do want to keep without hearing Shape Of You (Single), Shape Of You (Live) and Shape Of You (Remix) one after the other…
HOW TO Manage duplicates in your Music library
One way to find duplicates in your Music library is to select Songs in the sidebar, then click Titles at the top of the main window. The songs in your library will now be sorted alphabetically, so you can see tracks with a similar name.
But there is also a smarter way. Go to File > Library > Show Duplicate Items, and the main window will show you an updated list containing the songs that the Music app has identified (using the files’ metadata) as being identical.
The “Displaying Duplicates” label at the bottom right of the Music window shows that you’re now only viewing true duplicates. To exit this view without doing anything, click Done. But we’re going to have a little tidy–up first…
Before wading in and randomly deleting tracks, begin your cleanup by using the checkboxes to the left of each song title. Unchecking a song will prevent it from playing, but it won’t remove it from your library.
Here we’ve chosen to uncheck duplicate tracks found on compilation albums, greatest hits collections, singles and EPs, while preserving album tracks — but you don’t have to manage your duplicates this
