Remove all duplicate songs/mp3s iTunes creates using bash script

Alec Jacobson

September 22, 2009

weblog/

I gave up using iTunes to play music about year ago, but I haven't found a free alternative to iTunes's exceptional file management based on mp3 ID3 tags (If you know of one --- I mean better than iTunes one --- let me know). So occasionally I let iTunes organize my music library. I drop in folders containing new music and let iTunes go at it. The problem is that if I have folders containing an mp3 and an m3u playlist I get duplicates. If I don't notice this right away the duplicates build up. Here's a bash script to delete all true duplicates. The files must be exactly the same and have almost the same name (the difference being the number iTunes appends on a copy: "song.mp3" becomes "song 1.mp3"). Verbose version:

#!/bin/bash
find "$1" -regex ".* [0-9][0-9]*\.[^.]*" -print0 | while read -d $'\0' copy
do
  original=`echo "$copy" | sed "s/\(.*\) [0-9][0-9]*\(\.[^.]*\)/\1\2/"`
  # check that  the hypothetical original exists
  if [ -e "$original" ];then
    # check that the original is exactly the same file as the copy
    if diff "$original" "$copy" >/dev/null ;then
      rm "$copy"
      echo "$copy deleted..."
    else
      echo "$copy is different..."
      echo "  $copy not deleted..."
    fi
  else
    echo "$original does not exist..."
    echo "  $copy not deleted..."
  fi
done

Quiet Version

#!/bin/bash
find "$1" -regex ".* [0-9][0-9]*\.[^.]*" -print0 | while read -d $'\0' copy
do
  original=`echo "$copy" | sed "s/\(.*\) [0-9][0-9]*\(\.[^.]*\)/\1\2/"`
  # check that  the hypothetical original exists
  if [ -e "$original" ];then
    # check that the original is exactly the same file as the copy
    if diff "$original" "$copy" >/dev/null ;then
      rm "$copy"
    fi
  fi
done