Finding and Removing Duplicate Songs from Windows Media Player 12, 2018

Windows Media Player is the first name that pops up in the minds of most people when they are asked about their earliest memories of listening to their favorite artist or watching a movie to unwind after a hectic day at work. This does not suggest that there weren’t other players around, but Media Player (as it is commonly known) was the leader of the pack by some distance.

Fast forward several years, Windows Media Player has evolved from a firm market leader to an important player, and has been successful in retaining its place amid the spawning of its younger peer, Groove. Besides the most well-known tasks of playing audio and video, Media Player also helps users rip CDs, and burn Audio CDs as well as MP3 CDs. The default file formats are Windows Media Video (wmv), Windows Media Audio (wma), and the playlists are stored in Windows Playlist (WPL).

With today’s extremely fast and pacy lifestyle not leaving most people unaffected, most users tend to download songs without paying attention to organizing them into a well-crafted music database. The user might have saved the song(s) to the default download location, or to the last location which was used to save an important file, e.g. an official document. The advent of super-fast Internet speeds have also contributed to this mess as people don’t bother about looking up for the song which they know is sitting somewhere on the hard drive, and they instead proceed to re-download the song.

This is a pretty quick solution as far as finding the concerning song goes, however users end up wasting a huge amount of their hard disk over time. They run the risk of landing into a serious mess at some point in the future and will have to either pump up a significant sum of money to purchase an additional hard disk or will have no option other than deleting some data from the hard disk.

This is one of those scenarios which might seem all daunting and scary to an average computer user, however, they can be easily fixed by mixing up a neat technique (very easy to implement) as well as a computer-oriented solution.

Clone Files Checker

First up, we will get towards sweeping the duplicates from all locations. Clone Files Checker is a purpose-built software program, and it performs the job of sweeping clean all kinds of duplicates with a perfect degree. You can also use it to remove any duplicates on your Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive accounts directly on the cloud! We will pen down more details on these cloud scan options some day in the future.

Coming back to the topic, we can assure you that Clone Files Checker will weed out duplicate songs, even if, say 2 copies of the same song are named differently. This is because this software is intelligent enough to dive into the hash of each song and compare it with others, rather than looking out for the name. Another cool aspect is that Clone Files Checker requires minimal human input, so it is an ideal solution.

1. Download and install Clone Files Checker.
2. Launch the software and use the green Add button to add up as many locations on your computer as you think might contain duplicates. Selecting an entire drive or simply going for This PC is also a good idea.
3. In the next step, you can select Custom | Music so that the whole scan is concentrated on a select file type, and finishes much earlier than a universal file type scan.
4. If you think you want to scan for duplicate videos as well, select the Videos option in the last step also.
   

   

5. Now simply click the rectangular Start Search button to launch the scan. The scan might take a while to be over as you must have a huge collection of music/ video files in the computer.
6. Once the scan is over, you will be shown summarized scan results along with the Fix Wizard and Review & Fix buttons. We recommend going for the latter, as it provides you with more options on what you might want to do with the duplicates.
   

   

7. You will now be seeing the duplicates in the form of a list in the Clone Files Checker user interface. You can even click the Music and Videos tabs if you wish to check out specific file types.
   Note: For your convenience, Clone Files Checker contains a basic media player as well, which can be found just next to the results. You can use it if you’re not sure about a particular audio/ video file.
8. Now you can manually select the files for further action by clicking on the checkbox before every file. Once you’ve selected the files, click Select Action, make your call and you’re done. However, this option isn’t recommended when the number of duplicates runs into hundreds (or beyond), and so we move to the next step.
9. Click the green Select Duplicates button to choose which kind of duplicates you want to retain. All the available options are very simple and self-explanatory.
10. The final step is about clicking Select Action and choosing between permanently deleting the duplicates or backing them up to a folder. However, going for the former is recommended.

Now that you’ve removed all the duplicates from your computer (and Windows Media Player), you should also repopulate the Media Player library to remove all duplicate entries from it. This can be done very easily by following this method.

1. Press the Windows Key + R shortcut combination to bring up the Run window.
2. Type in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\ and press Enter.
3. Locate the Windows Media folder and delete it.
4. When you relaunch Windows Media Player, it will rebuild the library and remove all the duplicate entries from the library.

That’s it, folks. Keeping your data nicely organized is a must, so that you can quickly find a particular file without wasting any time. Another huge benefit which is too important to be ignored is that you will erase duplicates and free up invaluable hard disk space.