How to deal with duplicate audio files & reduce pool size?

How do you deal with duplicate audio files? I have tones of duplicates that I’d like to merge in order to keep the audio pool down and reduce its size.
For example I have: “tape8.wav”; “tape8_1.wav”; “tape8_2.wav”; “tape8_3.wav”.
All files are the same just with a different name. (I dont know how they got in there as a start … )
I tried to rename the files in Finder and then relink them after opening the project. Yet, this messed up my project performance and so I guess this is what you should NOT do.
Is there any good way to do this out of the pool.

Hi deepsea,

have you already tried the option “remove unused media” in the project pool?

Regards

Those could be edits so it might be good to keep them but do what Luis said above and you should be good.