Find Duplicates of Songs by Sound

A typical collection of music files contains some duplicates. Depending on the size of your collection, you may have just a few duplicates, or lots of them. Sometimes duplicates use up 10% of the space occupied by the corresponding music collection, in which case we waste about 10 Gb of space with a 100 Gb collection.

Music duplicates are copies of songs stored in different locations, or even in the same location under different names. Different audio formats may also be involved. For example, you can have one song in MP3, FLAC, APE, OGG, and in other formats.

Duplicates are not always unwanted. You may want to keep complete albums of your favorite artist / band, even if some song is available in several of the albums. But in most cases duplicates can be removed without regret. By deleting duplicates you not only free up valuable disk space, but also make your music collection cleaner.

There are several ways of finding duplicate music files. With a collection measured in gigabytes, manual search is out of the question. We could use a universal duplicate file finder, which is a program that evaluates such common parameters as file size, filename, extension, etc. The main advantage of such program is its ability to find any duplicates, not just music files. On the other hand, such program would not be able to find duplicates, if they have different filenames or slightly different size.

So, 'universal' is not always 'good', and a special duplicate finder for music files would provide much better results.

Music Duplicate Remover is such specialized program. It can evaluate not only parameters of files, but also their tags (title, artist, etc.). Almost all audio formats have similar sets of tag fields, so it is possible to find duplicates even in different formats by looking at their tags. The program no longer depends on filenames, they can be different now.

But what if tags are different, too? Or if there are no tags?

A human would simply listen to the songs and decide if they were duplicates. Luckily, a program can do something similar. If you select "By sound" from the "Compare" dropdown list in Music Duplicate Remover, no tags or other parameters of files are taken into account. The program finds duplicates solely by "listening" to your files.

This method works for files in all supported formats. Music Duplicate Remover is careful about finding duplicates, it is unlikely that you discover wrong hits when searching only by sound. On the other hand, you can easily misconfigure the program and get wrong hits when using a combined method or when finding duplicates by tags, which is yet another reason to prefer the "By sound" method. The only drawback of this method is its slowness. Still, it's a million times faster than a human can do.

Tags: Music Duplicate Remover

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