Duplicate Finder Settings

Music Duplicate Remover can find duplicate files in popular audio formats, such as MP3, WMA, FLAC, APE, OGG Vorbis etc. It comes with 3 preinstalled search schemes: compare files by ID3 tags, by sound, or both. So, it is possible to eliminate duplicate files in a few clicks: select a folder, click "Find duplicates", then click "Remove duplicates".

However, you may want to customize duplicate search parameters in order to get more precise results adapted to your music collection.

Click "Show settings" on the right to the "Compare" dropdown list:

This will expand the panel, and additional options will be shown.

Duplicate Search by Sound

When comparing files by sound, Music Duplicate Remover uses just a couple of basic parameters:

Threshold value determines how strictly the program should compare files. With lower values, more duplicates will be detected, but there is a chance to find files that are not exactly duplicates. With higher values, fewer duplicates will be found, but they are likely to be exact copies.

Max. difference sets the maximum time difference in seconds between duplicate files. If the program finds two files, and one of them is 8 seconds shorter than the other one, the program will not list them as duplicates no matter how similar they sound.

Make sure to check the "Compare by sound" box, if you want the program to find duplicate files by "listening" to the music.

Duplicate Search by ID3 tags

Searching duplicates by comparing their ID3 tags and file properties works faster than comparing by sound. This method is especially good for audio collections where files are tagged with important information like title, artist, year, album etc.

Check boxes next to names of the fields that you want to use for comparing files. On the right to each field's name, there is a number. It's the significance of the field. When you are trying to find duplicate files, some fields are more important than others. For example, title and artist are more important than genre or track number. The higher value you set for a particular field the more important it is when comparing music files from your collection. The value should be between 1 and 100.

Check the "Case sensitive" box, if the program should distinguish between upper and lower case letters when comparing tags. By default this box is not checked, and uppercase letters are equal to lowercase ones.

The "Ignore fields with empty values" option allows you to specify how empty fields should be handled. For example, if one file has some information in its "Title" field and another file has no information in this field, two actions are possible:

• Disregard information in the field and use other selected fields to compare the files. It's the same as if you'd unchecked the corresponding box for this particular file. That's what the "Ignore fields with empty values" box does, if checked.
• Assume that the fields are not equal to each other. That's what the "Ignore fields with empty values" box does, if not checked.

The last setting in the area is "The minimum similarity percent for duplicates". Here you can specify how similar two files should be in order to be marked as duplicates. The similarity percent is calculated using significance values of checked fields. It's worth of mentioning that the significance of each particular field depends on how many fields are checked and on their significance. If we have 5 fields checked, like on the screenshot above, and the program detects that "Artist" and "Duration" are equal in two files, the similarity percent for the two files is not 125, but 40,98, so the files are unlikely to be duplicates (as we have 80 as the minimum similarity percent in the example).