Abate the Groove’s Duplicate Songs in Windows 10

Duplicate files are a needless hassle for the user. All they are good for is eating up valuable hard disk space, slowing down searches for any particular file the user might undertake (manual or otherwise) and last but not least they greatly contribute to the continuous Low Disk Space warnings if they aren’t cared for in the beginning.

This article talks specifically about duplicate music files in Groove and how to remove them from the system in an easy way. The easiest, efficient and most time effective way to get rid of all kinds of dupes (including music files) is to use Clone Files Checker. Now let’s take a detailed look at various solutions we have come up with for this issue.

 

Solutions

Solutions 1: Use Clone Files Checker

1. Click on the Start button.

2. Search for Groove Music.

3. Open it from the search results

4. Once Groove opens, click on the Cog icon to open settings

5. Click on Choose where we look for music

6. Add all the root folders that contain your music collection. This will help Groove to specifically scan these folders and create playlists.

Build-your-Collection-from-your-Local-Music-Files

7. Open Clone Files Checker and add exactly the same folders which you specified to Groove in the previous step, to the Select drive/folder (Step 1) section

8. Select Custom and then Music (for specifying file types).

9. Click on Start Search to launch the duplicate scan.

10. Once the scan is over, you will click on Fix Wizard to remove all the duplicate music files in one go.

 

Solution 2: Keep All Your Music in a Single Folder

Windows has an inbuilt mechanism that sounds an alarm and prevents it from storing duplicate files in the same folder, but this method only works if the duplicate files have exactly the same names. If two files have different names with identical contents, Windows will fail to recognize them as duplicates. So you can prevent duplication in Windows 10 provided you save your entire music collection in a single folder only.

1. Open the Start Menu

2. Open File Explorer

3. Click on Music

4. Now copy all the music files from your computer to this folder

5. Search for Groove Music from the Start menu

6. Click to open it from the search results

7. Click the cogwheel icon to open settings

8. Click Choose where we look for music

Choose-where-we-look-for-music

9. Add <SYSTEM DRIVE>:\Users\%username%\Music for Groove to fetch music files from. Example: C:\Users\John\Music. Click Done at the end to make the changes permanent

Build-your-Collection-from-your-Local-Music-Files

 

Solution 3: Remove Songs’ Folder from One Drive

Users have been complaining that adding the OneDrive folder to search for music files in Groove proves to be a bad move as it can lead to duplication in Groove’s playlist. The only way out of this is to remove the OneDrive folder to eliminate any chances of duplicates being created in Groove’s playlist.

1. Open Start Menu

2. Search for Groove Music

3. Open it

4. Find the Cogwheel and click on it to bring up settings

5. Now click on Choose where we look for music

6. Remove ALL folder(s) associated with your OneDrive account from the following section. Click on Done to save all the changes in the end

Fix Groove Duplicate Songs
Groove Folders Help You Organize Your Music

Solution 4: Rebuild the Database of Groove

Some of you might still be getting duplicate files appearing in your Groove playlist even after following the previous solutions. What you need to do is perform the following steps to update the playlist and then restart Groove. Here is how you do it:

1. Open the Task Manager

2. Switch to the Details tab

3. Find WWAHost.exe and Stop it from running

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4. Navigate to the following location

  • C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.ZuneMusic_<SOME RANDOM NUMBERS>\LocalState\Database

5. Delete the folder named Database

6. Restart your computer.

Vikas is a technology enthusiast who loves writing articles on computers and technology. He writes on various topics related to software, software reviews, troubleshooting and tips & tricks to make people's digital lives better.