How to Remove Duplicate Albums in Windows Media Player

Raza Ali Kazmi Data Management, Duplicate Data, Duplicate Music, Solutions

Windows Media Player is the default media player in Windows. It has been part of the Microsoft Windows operating system for a long time. It was introduced back in the 1990s after the release of Windows 3.1 as part of the multimedia extensions.

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Windows Media Player supports playback of most commonly used audio and video file formats and online streaming of music and videos. You can also create playlists of your choice, automatically import music files from a specific drive or folder of your choice.

The first two methods provided below contain the manual procedure to identify & fix duplicate albums in Windows Media Player. If you’ve got plenty of duplicate albums, we will suggest skipping to Method # 3.

 

Method 1: Sort Albums Alphabetically by Album, Name or Artist & Identify Duplicates Manually

This is the manual way of finding duplicate Windows Media Player albums:

  1. Open Windows Media Player and switch to Full Mode by clicking the small icon located at the bottom right side of the WMP. If you’re already in Full Mode, you would see the Switch to Compact Mode tooltip.
  2. Start playing the items in your playlist that you want to sort and find duplicates. To select and play multiple music files, press and hold the Ctrl key while selecting the music files. Afterward, right-click the first item in the selection and choose the Play selected items option.
  3. Click on the Now Playing section.
  4. Click on the combo box Now Playing List and choose the Sort option.
  5. Now you can sort your music files by their album, name and artist.

 

Method 2: Sort Songs by Title or File Name & Identify Duplicates Manually

Another manual way is through the steps given below:

  1. Open Windows Media Player.
  2. Open a library you want to search for duplicates.
  3. Right-click on one of the columns in your library and select the Choose columns option from the right-click menu options.
  4. Choose one of the following options:
    1. Title
    2. File name
  5. Confirm the change by clicking OK.
  6. Right-click on one of the columns you want to sort and select the Sort option.

 

Method 3: Dedupe your Albums Automatically (Quick & Easy)

With hundreds of thousands of music files scattered all across your hard disk, it becomes difficult to find duplicate versions. Clone Files Checker can do the job with speed and accuracy.

  1. Download Clone Files Checker and install it.
  2. Click on the System Scan tab.
  3. Click on Add and choose a directory that contains your music files. Click on OK.
  4. You can add multiple directories of your choice.
  5. Once you’ve added the directories, set the scan mode to Custom > Music.
  6. Click on Start Search.
  7. The scan will begin. It may take some time.
    1. Once the scan is finished, click on the Fix Wizard option to initiate a simple wizard and take action against the duplicate files all at once.
    2. If you want to review the files yourself, choose Review & Fix. Mark the files you want to delete/ move and unmark the ones you want to keep. You can automate this task using the Select Duplicates button with a criteria of your choice. Once you’re done selecting the files, click on Select Action and delete/ move the duplicates to a folder.

Note: Clone Files Checker allows you to backup your duplicate files before deleting them. You can enable this feature from the program settings to compress your files to take lesser space and backup.

 

Advantages of Using Clone Files Checker:

  • Automated scan and faster results
  • 100% accuracy
  • In-house file previews
  • Multiple automatic file selection patterns
  • Delete duplicates or move them to another folder
  • Backup and restore duplicates
  • Scan history
  • iTunes music search
  • Delete empty folders from your disk
  • Scan all duplicate file types or specific file types (documents, photos, videos, music, etc)
  • Scan all file sizes or specific file sizes