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> Remove duplicate songs in Music

Music on my iMac shows I have over 25,000 songs, but my iPads have just over half of those. How can I remove all the duplicate songs on my Mac, and how did they get there in the first place?

It's not unusual to acquire duplicates of many of the songs in Music. You should get a good idea of how many there are by holding the Opt key and opening the Show Exact Duplicate Items command in the Library item of the File menu.

Although that aims to identify identical copies, it may show some that clearly aren't the same. Without the Opt key that command becomes Show Duplicate Items, and its matches are even looser. Of 1,300 tracks here, only 226 were claimed to be exact duplicates, and many of those actually proved to be different.