5 freeware utilities to find duplicate audio files in your music collection

You are a music fan, and you have huge amounts of the audio files, downloaded from the Web. If your collection is not organized, you might have big issues finding whatever you need and keeping it efficient and compact.

You may not even realize of how many duplicate music files you may have on your computer after numerous downloads from the Internet, and scattered over your home or corporate network. Duplicate files are in most cases redundant and unnecessary, so keeping them is merely a waste of valuable hard disk space. Your hard drives may be full of extra copies of audio files waiting to be removed.

I would like endorse in this post several freeware utilities, which will help you to locate and delete duplicate audio files from your storage. As you understand, that will save you huge amounts of time to check them manually, especially when the names and meta tags do not match.

1. Similarity

Similarity is a useful program that helps you to find and remove similar, duplicate musical files (MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV, FLAC, APE, WV, MPC) with the same or similar sound content, and music tags (ID3, WMF, and Vorbis). This is the one of the best programs on the market, where similarity of a sound part is checked, not just music tags or file content (through byte to byte comparison). In addition, the program analyzes the artist, title, album information from the music tags, contained in the audio files, and compares these with the appropriate entries in other files.

You can adjust sensitivity of searching criteria to find exact or similar files. In this way it is possible to identify similarly titles with smaller differences. Duplicate files can be deleted or browsed. The list of duplicate files can be sorted, exported to playlist, and acted upon.

Similarity multilingual application with full Unicode support. Currently available languages are: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Czech, and Bosnian.

Website: http://www.music-similarity.com/

Direct Download: http://www.music-similarity.com/downloads/similarity.zip

2. Find Duplicate Music Files

Find Duplicate Music Files is an open source freeware utility for Mac and Linux, allowing detecting audio files that contain the same music, even if the files are differently named, and are in different formats such as MP3, OGG, WAV, WMA, M4A, and RealAudio and contain different or non-existent meta-information such as ID3 tags.

The program operates on whole directories of music files, analyzes them, and outputs the filenames of pairs that seem similar, based on their audio fingerprint or perceptual hash.

Website: http://freshmeat.net/projects/fdmf

Direct Download: http://freshmeat.net/urls/330cb4f122c651cab85089bd583c46bf

3. dupeGuru Music Edition

dupeGuru Music Edition (ME for short) is a tool to find duplicate songs in your music collection. It can scan filenames, tags or contents. dupeGuru ME is a big brother of dupeGuru. It does everything dupeGuru does, but it has more information columns (such as bitrate, duration, tags, etc..) and more scan types (filename with fields, tags and audio content). dupeGuru ME runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Main Features

* dupeGuru ME is efficient.

Find your duplicate files in minutes, thanks to its quick fuzzy matching algorithm. dupeGuru ME not only finds filenames and tags that are the same, but it also finds similar ones. For example, with the right settings, dupeGuru ME can determine that "The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army" and "White Stripe - Seven Nation Armies" are duplicates.

* dupeGuru ME is customizable.

You can tweak its matching engine to find exactly the kind of duplicates you want to find. The Preference page of the help file lists all the scanning engine settings you can change.

* dupeGuru ME is safe.

Its engine has been especially designed with safety in mind. Its reference directory system as well as its grouping system prevents you from deleting files you didn't mean to delete.

* Supports multiple formats.

dupeGuru supports multiple formats: MP3, WMA, AAC (iTunes format), OGG, FLAC, lossless AAC and lossless WMA.

* dupeGuru ME is flexible.

Do whatever you want with your duplicates. Not only can you delete duplicates files dupeGuru finds, but you can also move or copy them elsewhere. There are also multiple ways to filter and sort your results to easily weed out false duplicates (for low threshold scans).

* Supported languages: English, French, German, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Italian, Armenian, Russian, Ukrainian, Brazilian.

Requirements

* Mac OS X: 10.6 and up (Snow Leopard (64-bit), Lion, Mountain Lion or Mavericks).

* Windows (64-bit): Win7/Win8.

* Windows (32-bit): XP/Vista/Win7.

* Linux: Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10, or Arch Linux.

Website: http://www.hardcoded.net/dupeguru_me/

4. AllDup

AllDup is free software that will help you to remove duplicate music files, remove duplicate music tracks and remove duplicate songs. The software will also assist you to automatically sort, organize and rename music files for your music collection to be in ideal order. AllDup will remove duplicate music files automatically, even if they have different names and are packed in archives.

Website: http://www.alldup.de/delete_duplicate_files/remove_duplicate_music_files.htm

Downloading page: http://www.alldup.de/en_download.htm#alldup

5. Duplicate Music Files Finder

Duplicate Music Files Finder can track your music files duplicates and delete them. The program uses advanced search techniques to detect duplicates (it searches MP3s TAGS, detects duplicates even if the file names are not the same etc). If duplicates are found you can delete the files you want: just check them and press the right mouse button. You can also play the selected files in your favorite Media Player to see if they really are duplicates.

Duplicate Music Files Finder comes with two more modules that can be used to quickly rename bad formated music files/Tags (artist & title tags). Just load one folder and it will detect the bad formated files/Tags and let you choose which of them to rename. Even though Duplicate Music Files Finder is specialized in detecting duplicates of music files, it does not mean that it can be used only for these file types. You can use the CRC Match or Exact File Name match methods to detect duplicates of other file types.

Note: The developer - LC IBros Solutions S.R.L. – does not support the software from 2007, and the their web site is not accessible. However, you still may download the software from other software portals.

OS: Windows

Download page (from Software Informer): http://duplicate-music-files-finder.software.informer.com/download/