Add new comment

You might think that you know iTunes quite well, but there are some not-so-obvious features that you might have missed. In this article I take a look at some functions that can be useful for managing your music collection and for playing music. You might know some of these tips, but do you know them all?

Duplicates and exact duplicates

There is a fairly obvious feature in iTunes that enables you to find duplicate tracks of music. It is easy to end up with more than one copy of a track, such as when you buy an artist’s album and then later on, buy a greatest hits compilation album. Your music library might be littered with duplicate tracks that are consuming valuable disk space on your Mac, and your iPhone and iPad too if you sync your music to them.

Duplicates need to be removed, so go to the View menu and select Show Duplicate Items.

After a quick scan of your music library, a list of tracks is displayed (give yourself a pat on the back and skip to the next tip if the list is empty).

In the screen shot above are six tracks – three tracks each with a duplicate. This sort of search is a simple one that simply looks at the track name. Look at the first two – Birdman Of Alcatraz. They are the same track with almost the same length, but looking in the Album column you can see that one is a studio version and the other is a live performance.

In this case I want to keep both because they are not identical. If the two tracks were the same, one could be right clicked and then deleted from the menu that is displayed. It is the same story with the other duplicates and they are the same track, but are different performances. Forever Autumn appears twice because the first is the original album and the second is the modern version with different artists. The Hocus Pocus versions are clearly different because one is nearly twice as long as the other.

Related: Move iTunes music to another drive and free up disk space

So I have duplicate tracks, but they are not really duplicates. Go back to the View menu and this time hold down the Option key on the keyboard. The menu changes and now it says Show Exact Duplicate Items.

This is a more powerful search that can detect that two tracks may have the same name and even the same length, but they are really different performances. If there are any tracks listed when you perform this search, go ahead and delete them (right click for a menu).

Monkeying around with MiniPlayer

If you want to listen to music while you do some other activity on your Mac, such as writing, web browsing, photo editing and so on, the full iTunes screen is too big and it gets in the way. If you minimise it you cannot see what is playing or use the play/pause and other controls.

The answer is MiniPlayer. This is on the Window menu and you can either show MiniPlayer in addition to iTunes or select Switch to MiniPlayer, which hides iTunes and just shows the MiniPlayer window.

When you switch to MiniPlayer, all you see is the album artwork in a small window on the desktop. It takes up little screen space and you can easily see what is playing.

Let the mouse hover over the window and a title bar and controls appear. This is the large artwork display. There is a button in the top right corner just below the Close button that can be used to Hide Large Artwork.

Click the button and you get an even smaller music player window. It contains just the basic controls you need and it leaves the rest of the screen free for whatever other application you want to run.

Returning to the large artwork MiniPlayer window, the borders can be dragged to resize it. You could make it smaller and have a mini MiniPlayer window like this.

Some of the controls are dropped when it is this small, but it is still functional. Move the mouse away and the controls are hidden leaving just the album cover in the mini MiniPlayer window.

The small MiniPlayer window could become buried beneath the windows of whatever application you are using and then when you want to skip to a new track or pause the music, it is hard to find. Open the full iTunes window, go to the iTunes menu and select Preferences.

Select the Advanced tab at the top and down near the bottom of the window is Keep MiniPlayer on top of all other windows. Tick the box and MiniPlayer won’t be hidden.

Related: Stop iTunes advertisers tracking your activities