Music duplicate finder

[telco2005]

Hi - I have nearly 25,000 tracks on my iTunes on my Mac (whenever I buy a CD I load it up), some inherited/transferred from my previous PC which was previously accessible by my 3 children. As a result I found that quite a large number (25-30% of the tracks, possibly higher) were duplicates & sometimes triplicates & more. I don't know exactly how this arose, except I'm pretty sure my kids may be the culprits, but now I find it's not a trivial exercise to delete the duplicates. I did find a piece of software a while ago which provided an elementary general check of duplicate files, but it wasn't thorough enough - I found there were still many duplicates remaining. So I think I need something a bit more sophisticated - with the ability for the user to select a sufficient number of parmeters to be fairly confident of isolating reasonably exact duplicates. If I could specify the filetype (mp3, WAV etc), the song name (with wildcards), song artist (with wildcards), the song length (within plus or minus xx seconds) - & thus from the resulting listing it might be possible for me to more easily inspect & select what I consider to be duplicates & either delete them or be able to move them to a separate folder for further analysis before deleting them for good.
In the past I have received terrific help with my queries from you guys & I still find it amazing how it seems that no problem is too small for your attention. I don't know if this sort of problem has come up before - I did do a search beforehand of this forum but got no results. If anyone knows of any software that would help (free or commercial) I would be most appreciative. regards Terry

[aussieboykie]

Terry

Take a look at Directory Opus which is capable of doing a lot of what you suggest using advanced search, flat view of folder structures, support for mp3 tags, and much more. In my opinion it's a must have piece of software and it's always the first thing I install on any new system. You can try it for free for up to 60 days. The support forums are very active and any questions are usually answered within a matter of hours.

Regards, AB

[telco2005]

Thanks AB - though it seems to be a Windows application. Do you know of something similar for the Mac? T

[gto-pontiac]

itune have a function to show duplicates, under FIle show Duplicate, then i know its going to be pain, but select then delete, make sure to select one of the duplicate not all of them. i had to do that to my over 80GB of mp3s over the years of collecting. took me over 2days but nots more simple and don't play the same song again and again.

[aussieboykie]

Thanks AB - though it seems to be a Windows application. Do you know of something similar for the Mac? T

Next time I'll pay closer attention!

[telco2005]

Thanks AB - I do have a PC connected in my home network - I might try Dopus on the PC's iTunes files & see if I can also access my Mac's iTunes files with it via the shared file facilty - Terry

[gto-pontiac]

they is a software that attaches to itune that finds and remove duplicate its called markelSoft Dupe Eliminator fro itune http://www.markelsoft.com/html/dupe_eli ... _help.html
its not free $39.95 its works as it just scanes the library but if the file name is different say hot & cold.mp3 and hot & cold1.mp3 it wan't pick it up.... so i did the old way, File show duplicate then select the duplicate then hit delete. took me over 4hours but it was free.

[gto-pontiac]

forgot to mention that if the files are kept other than defult location then that program will tell you its dead link, so once you have run the program, go to preference change the location of the file back to the original.
i had my music on my NAS witch is Y:\Music . the program for some reason changed that to C:/bla/bla/...../itune/... so just change that back to Y:/ then run the scan again. that worked and picked up most of the duplicates the tral only removes 3 so if you want to do more then you have to buy it....

[telco2005]

thanks GTO I'll give it a go - Terry