I have many music files downloaded from my different sources into my hard drives

Question

I have many music files downloaded from my different sources into my hard drives. I need a reliable, free piece of software to recognise and delete duplicate files. By duplicated,

I mean similar content and format. Filename is a good starting point, but I also have some files that are named just "Track 1", "Track 2" and so on. Therefore, a tool that checksums file contents and shows duplicates is needed.

The tool I want must not contain any ads for installing other products, or toolbars, or similar unnecessary add-ons. It should be free as in I don't have to pay anything.

Explanation / Answer

I think your problem constists of two subproblems. You first need to find out which songs are duplicates and then delete them.

For finding duplicates I recommend MusicBrainz Picard. This takes fingerprints of your files and tags them correctly. It also offers renaming and moving the files. If there are duplicates the filename will have an additional number in braces. So for example the first file may be named Artist - Song.mp3 and the second is then Artist - Song (1).mp3.

To be sure that this is not misleading,put each album into separate folders and include the track number in the filename (such as $Albumartist/$Album/$Number - $Title). You can run the program again later to give the real name after the superfluous files are deleted. Retagging a file that has already been tagged using picard is much faster, because fingerprints are not calculated twice.

Solutions for actually deleting the files differ from OS to OS. I would recommend searching for *(1).mp3 and deleting the files manually. This way you can decide which file you want to keep in case they differ (e.g. in quality/size).

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