Find Duplicate Songs in One YouTube Playlist

A song plays twice in a 300-song playlist, and you can't tell where the second copy is. Scrolling and squinting does not scale past a few dozen rows.

Short answer: YouTube Music can warn you when you add a song that is already in a playlist, but it has no list of the repeats already inside one. To find them, export the playlist's video IDs into a spreadsheet and count each ID. Anything counted more than once is a repeat.

Why a playlist ends up with repeats

• You add songs over years and forget what is already there.
• You add whole albums, or merge another playlist into this one.
• One song exists as several videos: an official video, an audio-only track, a lyric video. They look like repeats to you and different items to YouTube. See what counts as the same song for how to treat them.

Find repeats inside one playlist

Two kinds of match, with different effort.

Exact repeats: the same video twice

1. Export your playlists with Google Takeout (takeout.google.com), or use a tool that lists a playlist's video IDs and titles.
2. Put the playlist's video IDs in column A of a spreadsheet, with a header in row 1.
3. In B2, enter =COUNTIF(A:A, A2) and fill it down.
4. Filter column B for values above 1. Those are the repeats.

Each video has a unique 11-character ID, so a count above 1 is a very strong match.

Likely repeats: the same song, different upload

Takeout may give only IDs, so use a tool that also exports titles. Put the titles in a column too. Make a cleaned copy: lowercase, with extras like "official video", "lyrics" and anything in brackets removed. Count the cleaned titles the same way. The result is a list to review by hand, not a verdict. A live version and a studio version are different songs to you, even if the title matches.

Remove the extra copy

Back in YouTube Music, remove the copies you do not want. The spreadsheet only points you to them. It changes nothing in your account.

The limits of the spreadsheet

• It is a snapshot. The next song you add makes it out of date.
• Rebuilding it for every playlist takes a while.
• Deleted songs have no title to match. If your playlist has blank [Deleted video] rows, see how to find deleted songs in a playlist first.

Find the same song across all your playlists

Repeats across playlists are often the bigger mess. Liked Music overlaps with almost everything, and mood playlists overlap on purpose.

PermaMusic has a Duplicate Finder for this. It reads the playlists you choose with read-only access and lists each video that appears in more than one tracked playlist, with the playlist name and position of every copy. It matches by video ID, so an exact match is flagged and a different upload of the same song needs a look by hand.

It finds songs repeated across playlists. It only flags songs that are in more than one tracked playlist, so use the spreadsheet method above for repeats inside one playlist. PermaMusic does not change anything in your YouTube account.

The free plan includes a first full scan and flags a limited number of duplicates, so you can see how much overlap you have before deciding on more.

See it on a sample library

The demo shows the Duplicate Finder on a made-up library, with no sign-in. Open the demo's Duplicate Songs page or browse the full demo. For the full method across playlists, read the YouTube playlist duplicate finder guide.

Recap

• YouTube Music can warn when you add a repeat. It does not list the ones already in a playlist.
• A Takeout export and a COUNTIF finds exact repeats inside one playlist.
• Different uploads of one song need a review by hand.
• A connected tool finds the same video across playlists. Use the spreadsheet for repeats inside one.