I have literally thousands of songs that itunes thinks are dupes. An itunes dupe search lists them, but I do not see any way of deleting every other one, and can only laboriously click on each one individually

Surely there is a better way?

I have run dupe programs on my hard drive and am relatively dupe free so I do not understand how itunes thinks there are so many

Sometimes iTunes thinks they are dupes because the same song is in more than one playlist. I have some songs that are at different bit rates too. So, with those I have to individually delete the one I don't want. You could , like I have done in the past when I find a better quality, higher bit rate album, delete the entire album or playlist, then put the new ones back in. You could also use smart playlist to find an artist or album, delete it and the files, then put them back in again. I know, iTunes can be a pain in the ass at times. I also use VLC to play music on my computer because it plays .flac music files. There is a way to make iTunes play them too, but it sounded like kind of a pain as you have to rename the .flac part and use a third party iTunes plugin to do it. Maybe someone else has found a better way than I have. Once or twice I have deleted the entire library and started over again...

[command]+[delete]

that will delete every file - I want to delete every other one or 1 file per pair

Tried Media Monkey and it shows 400 dupes

Wonder why the difference?

Try using this script to locate and delete "dead tracks".http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=removedeadsuper

If you can live without your playlists, there's a simple solution: Delete all files (without throwing them in the trash). Then drop your entire iTunes music folder - which still has all the files - back on iTunes.

I have done that a few times to clean up my library. I think it kills the playlists though, they remain but they're all going to be empty. I am not sure whether exporting and re-importing them would work - I don't use playlists all that much so I don't mind...