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[Grenache]

I suddenly have a lot of duplicate entries in my library. The paths for the duplicates are identical, but in most - but not all - instances the tagging differ. All the affected files are on an external hard drive that I remove from time to time, so it must have something to do with MC reimporting the files when I reconnected the drive.

I'm talking about thousands of duplicates, so removing them manually is not an option. Any ideas what to do?

Currently using .154 but this could have happened several builds ago.

[whatsup]

try the restore library it worked for me

[yannis]

Do you mean there are real dupes in your local folders? Or just new entries in the Library?

Try checking the durations - at some very earlier point MC had created countless snippets of my songs, but they were 2 seconds long, so it was easy to get rid of them.

[The Mastermind]

I had this happen too. It was very irritating.

I noticed it only happened to FLAC files and not MP3s.

[Grenache]

Do you mean there are real dupes in your local folders? Or just new entries in the Library?

No, they're not real dupes, but duplicate entries with the same name referring to the same files and paths.

[Grenache]

try the restore library it worked for me

I know. But as I don't check the affected files on the external drive that often I don't know when the library was messed up. I may have to restore a library from several weeks ago and then lose a lot of manually entered information and play stats. And even worse: how can I be sure that this won't happen again?

[whatsup]

I have noticed that when I had to use the backup feature it did the back up from a past backup (of course) but then it went ahead and added the new stuff I had changed since the back up...am I making any sense...lol...so in the end I hadn't lost anything and the new stuff including tags were in tack. that was of course on the main drive for the files so your case may be different with files stored at two locations and what files u changed, I guess. MC18 when in pane mode reported I had exactly twice as many files as I truly had and said I was using twice the hd space...it freaked me out at first....

[pcstockton]

It sounds like you Restored a saved library from another computer then imported the same audio again???

[Grenache]

It sounds like you Restored a saved library from another computer then imported the same audio again???

It does, but I didn't. In fact I haven't done anything except for removing and reconnecting the external drive, so the Auto Import is to blame.

I've now spend several hours removing the duplicate entries manually. Fortunately I could use the Date Imported field, which in most cases was the only tag that differed, otherwise it would have taken days.

I really hope this won't happen again. It shouldn't be possible to get duplicate entries in the library when using a serious database application.

[JimH]

If your drive showed up as E: one time and then F: another time, for example, it would look like two different drives.  Windows does that sometimes.  People get around it by assigning the drive to a high letter, like Z:

You could search for E: files and remove them by pressing the Delete key.  Try a few before you do very many and verify that you're getting the results you expect.

[Grenache]

If your drive showed up as E: one time and then F: another time, for example, it would look like two different drives.  Windows does that sometimes.  People get around it by assigning the drive to a high letter, like Z:
You could search for E: files and remove them by pressing the Delete key.  Try a few before you do very many and verify that you're getting the results you expect.

Thanks, but this external drive is firmly assigned to the letter M and has always shown up as that. Also, as I stated above, the paths including the drive letter were exactly the same for all the duplicate entries.

What I didn't mention in my last post was that the Date Imported field for the dupes showed a date two months ago, so I guess it was due to a temporary bug that since has been fixed - or at least I hope so.

[pcstockton]

Why not just clear the library and reimport?  Should fix everything.