Handling Duplicates

When performing any sort of importing or copying using PowerTunes, PowerTunes gives you additional options that let you avoid importing duplicate copies of a song into a library. If you check the "Don't import duplicates" checkbox in the Music Copying section of the preferences window, then for each song or video you try to copy to another library, PowerTunes will search the destination library to see if that song or video already exist in the library. If PowerTunes finds an existing copy of the track, then it will not import a second copy of it.

PowerTunes identifies duplicates by comparing one or more attributes of the track against those fields of the tracks in the destination library. The attributes it will use for this comparison are the track's name, artist, album, duration, bitrate, and file type. If PowerTunes finds a track in the destination library whose values for all of these attributes are the same, then that track is identified as being a duplicate of the track being imported. You can customize this behavior in the preferences to only compare a subset of these attributes. For example, if you don't care whether the two tracks' duration are the same, you can uncheck that box, and PowerTunes will only compare using the other five values.

When you copy playlists or perform a merge, PowerTunes automatically recreates the copied playlists in the destination library and adds all the same tracks to the recreated playlists as were in the original playlists. If a duplicate is identified for a track in a copied playlist, by default PowerTunes will add that duplicate track to the recreated playlist in place of the original track. You can turn off this behavior if you wish by unchecking the checkbox for it in the preferences window.