I don’t have the biggest iTunes library in the world, but it’s big enough to become unmanageable sometimes. That’s a problem I’ve been looking to fix for some time and I think LairWare’s Song Sergeant may be the answer. With 7,500 songs, numerous movies, television shows and a lot of concerts, I’ve pretty much given up trying to keep up with duplicate copies of my media. That’s a problem for a number of reasons, not the least of which is hard drive space.

The first place I go whenever my computer starts to get full is the iTunes Library. I know there is always some space to free up there. I start with the movies and videos because those will free up the most.

Because I don’t get very much space by keeping the songs organized, I typically don’t bother with those. That’s not good either.

I like to keep track of the number of times a song was played, the last time it was played, etc. I don’t know why, I’ve been doing it for a long time and enjoy the stats. Obviously, with multiple copies of songs, these stats get really messed up.

I didn’t want an app that would just find duplicates and delete them. I wanted some control, but also the ability to do a mass clean-up, if I was satisfied with what it found. I decided to give Song Sergeant a try and see what it could do.

The interface is pretty good. It has different categories of problems it found along the top: Duplicates, Inconsistent, Orphans and Missing.

I was shocked to find over 900 duplicates the first time I ran the app and even more shocked to see that it listed the same song from different albums as duplicates. That was quickly solved with a trip to the preferences where you are able to control what information must be the same in order for the song to be considered a duplicate.

Once I added “Album,” my duplicate total went down to 189. I felt much better about that.

You have three choices after looking through the list of duplicates. You can Merge the files and move the duplicates to the trash; Merge the files and move the duplicates to a folder on the Desktop; or put the duplicates in an “Unkept” playlist.

Song Sergeant has plenty of options that allow you to control how it finds duplicates and which of the songs it recommends keeping. I would like the option to Merge a single song, but that’s not available in the initial release.

Overall, I was quite impressed with Song Sergeant. It did what it was supposed to do in an easy to use way and didn’t make me regret trying to clean up my iTunes Library.