3 Ways to Remove Duplicate Songs from iPhone for Free

Updated Nov 21,2018 | by Cody

If you are like me, you probably also have added the same music track to the Music library more than once. Don’t worry, I have been there. In this article, I will show you 3 simple methods to remove duplicate songs from iPhone.

Whether the songs are imported from other location or Apple Music, you can use one of these three methods to remove duplicates as long as they are added in the Music Library. If you do not have a PC around you, just try the third method. It allows you to easily delete duplicate tracks without iTunes or PC, which is kind of cool.

As you probably know, iTunes has an option to show all the duplicate items. From there, you can manually delete all the duplicate songs altogether. To get this option, you can first select a playlist, a few songs, or the entire library, and then you click File > Library > Show Duplicate Items.

If you only want to remove exact duplicate tracks, press and hold Shift key while you click File button.

If you only want to delete downloaded items, you need first click View and select Only Downloaded Music before you showing duplicate items.

However, the option Show Duplicate Items is greyed out when you want to perform this on your iOS device. If you have Apple Music subscription, you can login in to your account on iTunes, and the songs you deleted from iTunes will also apply to your iCloud Music Library on your iPhone. 

If you only find duplicate songs on iPhone but not in iTunes, then you just skip to method 3.

It is great that iTunes shows all the duplicate items, but you still need to pick one version of the listed items to keep or delete. If you have too many duplicate songs, you still need to spend much time picking and deleting the ones that you do not want to keep.

Luckily, someone has written a script Deduper to automatically pick the best version to save and delete other duplicate items.

There is no complicated setup needed. You can download it from here to run. Though you can choose to preview & confirm each action, it is still recommended to backup your library before running this script. At least, you should save a copy of the iTunes Library.itl file.

If you cannot download this file, you copy all the codes and paste on a txt file and change the file extension to vbs.

You can select the Music source in your library to run this script. If you do not select a music source, this script will check all the downloaded music for duplicates.

As you can see this method can only delete the physically downloaded duplicate songs from iTunes library. If you need a better way to remove duplicate music from iPhone, keep reading.

This method will use the new feature of iOS 12 Siri Shortcuts. Shortcuts app is an updated version of Workflow, an automation app that automates the things you do. You can free download the Shortcuts app from AppStore to get started.

Shortcuts can do many things and make your iPhone more powerful. Here, you can simply get this shortcut to check all the duplicate songs and create a new playlist of all the duplicate items. Let me show you how it works.

Step 1. Install the Shortcuts app if you haven’t. Then open this link in Safari to get this Apple Music Check Duplicates shortcut.

Step 2. Tap to run this shortcut.

Step 3. When completed, open the Music app and find the Redundant Songs playlist. Now you can delete all songs in this playlist from Library.

After that, you will find your music library has no duplicate songs. This works for songs you added to library from Apple Music or free song you imported from other locations.

Speaking of importing free music to iPhone, you can use an easier tool IOTransfer to transfer music and other files to your iOS device without iTunes. As I have heard, many users think iTunes not easy to use and sometimes having issues.

IOTransfer allows you to import music to iPhone by dragging and dropping the music files. Of course, you can select multiple songs at once. You may not always carry the USB cable, but don’t worry. IOTransfer also enables you to transfer files to iPhone over Wi-Fi.

If you enjoy music from YouTube, you can also use IOTransfer to download YouTube videos to MP3 and save them to your iPhone music library. 

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