How to Delete Duplicate Music Files on PC [Windows OS]

How do I find and remove duplicate music files?

If you are an avid music lover, chances are your computer is a repository for a large number of music files. A by-product of this musical richness is often the proliferation of repetitive songs in music libraries.

While duplicates generally do not pose a threat to your Windows system, their unchecked presence may gradually consume valuable hard drive storage space, leading to disorganized files and the need for more extensive backup space. That's why you are looking for the answer to how to delete duplicate music files on PC.

Duplicate files can infiltrate your PC in a variety of ways:
✦ Redundant downloads: download the same file multiple times.
✦ Backup copy: create duplicate backups of the same music or other files.
✦ File relocation: copying and pasting files, resulting in unintentional duplication.

Windows PC offers a variety of options to manage and eliminate duplicate music files, thereby preserving important disk space. This article describes the three best ways to identify and eliminate duplicate music files, ensuring you free up valuable disk space. Stay engaged as we uncover these effective and practical methods.

How to delete duplicate music files on PC (3 ways)

In this part, we‘ll list three effective and practical methods to help you with duplicate files deletion. Walk yourself through the specific steps and select the most suitable one based on your need.

Way 1. Search and delete duplicate music files

An easy way to eliminate duplicate audio files is to utilize the search function and follow these steps:

Step 1. Navigate to the Start menu and select Search. Enter the name of the folder containing your music collection.

Step 2. In the folder, select the View menu and switch to Detail View. This will display a complete list of your audio files.

Step 3. Go to the Sort by option and select the Name column. Alphabetical order helps review audio files more efficiently.

Step 4. Go through each file carefully to distinguish between true duplicates and those that only share a name but contain different content. Once you find inconsistent duplicates, select the Remove option to remove them.

Way 2. Delete duplicate music files using Indexing Options

Discovering duplicate files on Windows computers is easily achieved through File Explorer. Follow these steps to see how to delete duplicate MP3 files:

Step 1. Navigate to the lower-left corner adjacent to the Windows icon. In the search bar, type "Indexing Options" and click on the corresponding result.

Step 2. Click "Modify" and choose "Show all locations." A pop-up will prompt for login details; ensure you're using an administrator account.

Step 3. Verify that all boxes are ticked under the "Changed selected locations" section. Click "OK" and then "Close". If boxes are unchecked, ensure they're all selected.

Step 4. Simultaneously press the Windows key and E key to launch File Explorer. For easier file location, explore under your user account, found in Windows (C:) > Users.

Step 5. Click "Search" in the upper-right corner. Input file extensions based on their format (e.g., .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, etc.).

Step 6. Organize search results by Name:

1. Navigate to the "View" tab.
2. In the "Panes" section, opt for "Preview pane".
3. Under "Layout," choose "Details".
4. In the "Current view" section, click "Group by" and select "Name".
5. To arrange files in ascending order, click "Group by" and choose "Ascending".

Step 7. Examine files to identify duplicates in different locations. Utilize the "Date modified" column to spot the latest version of each file.

Step 8. After reviewing, select the file for deletion and press the DELETE key on your keyboard.

Way 3. Try professional duplicate music files finder

Relying on Windows to manually search for duplicate files can be a time-consuming and inefficient task, especially given the variety of file types present on your computer. Your system holds a variety of file formats, not just pictures and music. Manually filtering these files requires checking and removing multiple types, each with its own unique set of file names. For example, music files alone can exist in various formats such as .mp3, .aac, .m4a, etc.

Given this complexity, a more practical approach is to utilize a professional duplicate music file finder such as AOMEI Partition Assistant for Cleanup. This tool provides a comprehensive solution by scanning all drives simultaneously, compiling a comprehensive list of duplicate files. With this approach, the process of how to delete duplicate music files in Windows 10 becomes streamlined and efficient.

AOMEI Partition Assistant for Cleanup

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Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant for Cleanup. Click the "Find Duplicate Files" tab.

Step 2. You can either click "Scan Now" to start the scan of your system C: drive. Or, click "Custom Scan" to manually select paths to be scanned. (Here, we take the "Custom Scan" as an example.)

Step 3. After clicking "Custom Scan", all local and external drives on your PC will be displayed. You can also click the "Add Path" button, and then a browse folder window will pop up. So you can add more paths on this PC, like Desktop, Downloads, and other folder paths.

Step 4. Once necessary paths are added, you can click the "Scan Now" button to start the scan process.

The scan process might take time. After the scan is complete, all duplicate files will be listed. You can click the button behind to locate them.

You can either manually select duplicate files, or click the "Smart Select" button to automatically select unnecessary duplicate files to delete.

Tips: If the "Smart Select" is ticked, only the oldest duplicate file will be unticked. It means that all duplicate files except the oldest one will be ticked to delete. (The oldest file means the file that was created first. This file will not be deleted. All other duplicate files are considered copies of the oldest file. )

If you manually select all copies of duplicate files, you will get a pop-up warning window to keep at least one copy of the duplicate files. If you indeed want to delete all copies of duplicate files, you can click "OK" so all copies of duplicate files will be selected to delete.  

After unnecessary duplicate files are selected, please click the "Clean Now" button to start the deletion.

Step 5. The deletion might take time. After the process is finished, the selected files will be deleted, and you will get a cleaning completed window displaying how much data you deleted in total. 

Conclusion

That’s all about how to delete duplicate music files on PC. As you can see, AOMEI Partition Assistant for Cleanup is more applicable. In addition to performing the function of Windows searching for duplicate files and facilitating their removal, AOMEI software also extends a suite of solutions for maintaining clean and fast PC performance. Exploring features like cleaning junk files and deleting large files can greatly help optimize system efficiency.