Software to weed out copies of mp3 files

November 22, 2006 9:56 PM

Is there any software (WinXP) that will take two (or more) audio files and compare them to see if they are similar. I have a ton of mp3 files in a directory and some of them have duplicates with slightly different names. Apart from looking at each file individually and making a note of whether it has a duplicate or not, is there any other way to weed out copies?
posted by sk381 to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

MusicBrainz has software that they claim will produce an acoustic fingerprint of an audio file.
posted by rdr at 10:03 PM on November 22, 2006

I usually weed out copies by comparing the track lengths, which is also how the gracenote CDDB identifies albums. This is easy to do in either iTunes or Winamp.
posted by indigoskynet at 10:29 PM on November 22, 2006

Response by poster: indigoskynet, is there a built in function in either of them?
posted by sk381 at 10:33 PM on November 22, 2006

Actually, iTunes does have a"Show Duplicate Songs" command (in the Edit menu), but you would need to import all of your files to the library first. This probably isn't ideal, but it is an option.
posted by niles at 11:24 PM on November 22, 2006

Duplicate File Finder. It works on all types of files and compares them by the binary data. It is free (as in beer), and works very, very well with very few "mistakes".
posted by ChazB at 3:57 AM on November 23, 2006

If you want something quick and dirty, open a command prompt.

FC /B file1 file2

FC = File compare
/B = binary compare (vs, ASCII)
posted by mphuie at 1:29 AM on November 24, 2006

I've been really pleased with this guy: http://pyfdupes.sourceforge.net/

And of course if you like Python and want a more hands on approach allow me to plug a little script I made myself a long time ago:
Removing duplicate MP3's with Python
posted by GregX3 at 8:32 PM on November 24, 2006