What is the best software to manage dupes and clean up data in iTunes?

Question

I know there are a lot of paid options but was wondering what folks have found to be the best. Following tasks would be the minimum requirement:

• merging dupes
• identifying dupes with case difference
• identifying dupes with pluralisation difference
• identifying dupes with spelling probs
• identifying dupes where collaborating artists are cited differently
• identifying when 2 tracks are not dupes because track lengths are different
• getting album art where it is missing

Answer 1

I use itunes in built find duplicates then manually trawl the list. Be careful though as itunes matches tracks on tags ( name ) thus a 7min version of a track can be match to a 3min version of a track with the same title.

I do not know of an application that can reliably find imagines for missing album work. Completely forgot about Tuneup which can clean up and mp3's and find missing imagines. Has some very good review although I have yet to use :)

Answer 2

iTunes has a "show duplicates" menu item.

Answer 3

I downloaded the COM library form the Apple site and wrote a Macro in Excel to do some simple Soundex Matching on tracks, this sorted out my library to some extent. I belive you can do something similar on a Mac (I then switched to a Zune which made the whole task much simpler)

Answer 4

I haven't looked into the available options, but if you're feeling adventurous, you can try using some AppleScript to at least help identify duplicates (if not delete them).

Answer 5

Partial answer: GimmeSomeTune can do missing artwork, and does it well.