Duplicate songs in iTunes

So I recently downloaded a lot of free songs and a number of purchased from Amazon. I now have a number of duplicate albums, and a number of single albums but with duplicated or triplicated songs.

Since the majority of my iTunes library is from cds (a few hundred), I don’t want to wipe out my library and restart.

I assume I can just delete a duplicated album. How do I delete the extra songs within a single album? I did play through, each song plays--so if it’s listed twice, each will repeat in order (1,1,2,2,3,3....) instead of (1,2,3...)

This gets a bit tricky. There are products that do a good job of finding dupes. I use Gemini, which can be pointed to your Music folder to find dupes. But the challenge is knowing WHICH dupe to delete. You want to get rid of the duped tracks, but keep the good Album, so that requires making sure that the tracks for any given Album stay together in that album folder and don't end up in two separate folders. The cleverest (IMHO) way is to right click on one copy of a duped track in an album, choose "Show in Finder" and see where it is stored. Then repeat with the other track to see where IT is stored. Pick the one to delete and again "Show in Finder." Now comes the sort of scary part--make the assumption that the other tracks in THAT folder are also dupes you want to get rid of. Select them all and delete them. Now repeat that for each album with dupes.

That process will get rid of the files, but NOT the listing in iTunes. To do that, in iTunes, got to the Music display. Right Click on the column header at the top of the display and add the field Beats Per Minute to the display (Assumes you aren't using that for anything--99% of us aren't). Now in the same Music display, from the top bar do a Edit/Select All, the right click on any track and Get Info. (You will get a box asking if you REALLY want to edit all of them.)

Now edit the Beats Per Minute field from blank to "999" and let it rip. What will happen is that iTunes will try to update that data in each track, and will fail on all the tracks you deleted. When it is done (It will take a while, depending on the number of tracks), click on the header row to sort by Beats Per Minute. The tracks with "999" will sort together and the tracks still at blank will sort together. Now select all of the tracks with nothing in the Beats Per minute column, right click on one of them, delete them all. Now again select ALL, Get Info and edit the Beats Per Minute back to blank (just delete the 999 in the form) and let iTunes update them again. Finally, right click the header row and deselect the "Beats Per Minute" from the display.

Done.