iTunes Sucks at Handling Duplicates

You want to know something that sucks about iTunes? The way that it handles duplicates. All of my mp3s are on an external drobo on my network. When I tell iTunes to add this networked drive to my library it begins to go through the process of importing these tracks.

Because I have a lot of mp3s and it takes hours if not days to import them into iTunes, several attempts at importing my large library have resulted in incomplete import jobs. Each time I attempt to have iTunes reimport my mp3s from this external drive though it starts all over again and imports exact copies of songs it already has in the library.

Why can't iTunes be smart enough to realize that if it's already imported the exact same song from the exact same file location that there is no need to reimport it again a second time.

What this means is that the only way I can get a good copy of my mp3 library on iTunes is if the import process is done once only and done flawlessly. It also means that going forward I have to add each new album I add to my library manually one by one by name in order to avoid iTunes flooding my library with more duplicates.

How can a product from Apple simply be this stupid?

Of course iTunes does have a "show duplicates" function, but I'm not really very inclined to manually go through thousands of duplicates in my iTunes library and spend hours and hours trying to remedy this problem.

The only solution seems to be to try adding the drive over and over and over again until it completes it correctly in one fell swoop. That is really lame and it's unfortunate iTunes can't manage an mp3 library better than this.