Removing duplicate entries from Windows Media Player without deleting

Mr Davo · 28 Jun 2012

Hi Everyone,

I am using Windows Media Player 12 and I would like to remove duplicate song entries from my Music Library without deleting files from a networked computer.

My challenge is that I have added multiple networked folder locations to my Media Library, and on some of those network drives the same Albums exists.

For example

\\Computer1\My Music
+ Album ABC
+ Album DEF
+ Album XYZ

\\Computer2\My Music
+ Album GHI
+ Album STU
+ Album XYZ

In the above example both Computers 1 & 2 have a local copy of Album XYZ. Because of this every song appears twice in the Media Player Library (and by inference Playlist).

Further to the above example if I open Media Player and perform a search for Album XYZ I then see the following -

Song1
Song1
Song2
Song2
Song3
Song3
Song4
Song4
etc...

I can right click on individual songs and select "Remove from this list" - however this is very tedious.

Is there a way of telling Media Player to only put one copy of each individual song into the Media Library regardless of how many copies of the song actually exist in the Libraries folder locations?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Davo

Night Hawk · 29 Jun 2012

That's generally a quick fix by simply right clicking on the intended item in the play list and selecting the "remove from play list" option not the other "delete from computer" seen along with it.

You also have to go the menu bar>Tools>options and open up the Library tab to make sure the "delete files from computer when deleted from Library" box is unchecked there as well. Otherwise when removed in the Library you will lose whatever track you decided to remove from there or on a play list!

In addition to that you will want to see the "automatically add new song to library" option unchecked as well to prevent duplicate entries.