iTunes SDK and C# – Part 2

In part one of my series on scripting iTunes using C# I showed you how to remove dead tracks from your iTunes library. Now let’s take it one step further and get rid of all those duplicate tracks you might have. For my purposes, I determined a duplicate track to be any track that has the same artist, album and track name as another track in the library. When I find a duplicate, I want to keep the track with a higher bitrate. iTunes will show you a list of the duplicates in your library, but I’m much to lazy to sort out what should be deleted and what shouldn’t.

I used a Dictionary object to store the tracks I checked with the key being the track name. If a matching name is found, then I dig a little deeper to verify that a duplicate has actually been found, then I keep the one with a higher bitrate.

Download the VS2008 C# Express project here.

Here’s a code sample:

//create a reference to iTunes 
iTunesAppClass iTunes = new iTunesAppClass();

//get a reference to the collection of all tracks
IITTrackCollection tracks = iTunes.LibraryPlaylist.Tracks;

int trackCount = tracks.Count;
Dictionary<string, IITTrack> trackCollection = new Dictionary<string, IITTrack>();
ArrayList tracksToRemove = new ArrayList();

for (int i = trackCount; i > 0; i–)
{
        if (tracks[i].Kind == ITTrackKind.ITTrackKindFile)
        {        
             string trackKey = tracks[i].Name + tracks[i].Artist + tracks[i].Album;

            if (!trackCollection.ContainsKey(trackKey))
            {
               trackCollection.Add(trackKey, tracks[i]);
            }
            else
            {
                if (trackCollection[trackKey].Album != tracks[i].Album ||
                     trackCollection[trackKey].Artist != tracks[i].Artist)
                {
                    trackCollection.Add(trackKey, tracks[i]);
                 }
                 else if (trackCollection[trackKey].BitRate > tracks[i].BitRate)
                 {
                      tracksToRemove.Add(tracks[i]);
                  }
                  else
                  {
                      tracksToRemove.Add(tracks[i]);
                   }                           
            }
     }     
}                          

//now remove all duplicates
for (int i = 0; i < tracksToRemove.Count; i++)
{
     tracksToRemove[i].Delete();
}