I've had a music library for something like eighteen years now. I've bought music on a bunch of different devices, including dumb phones, smart phones, tablets, and probably some other whatnot. Also, some tools I've used have resampled files when they loaded them on players. When I migrate away, I try to merge the old library back into the main library.

I also did the burn to disc/rip the disc workaround in the early days of iTunes Fairplay DRM.

As a result, I have several duplicates of much of the music in my library. There may be copies in several formats and bitrates.

I want a nice clean music folder. The whole thing is too big and complicated to tackle manually if I ever mean to finish. My guess is I have about 12GB of music taking about 25GB of space.

I've used fslint on Linux to delete duplicates based on file hash, but that only did so much.

iTunes has (had?) a feature to show duplicates, but it was, as best, guided manual deduplication.

Any suggestions for tools to make this mess more sensible? I keep thinking a tool that recognizes the track by listening to it, then chooses the longest (in time) and highest quality version would be great. If it could rate each delete with a confidence, that's be great too. I've never found anything like that, and I am, at best, a passable batch file author, not a programmer.

So, what have you used?

It might be possible to write a bash or python script to compare artist, title, length and format if you can find a program to extract the metadata from these audio files...if you want to "listen to it" things get more complicated, but you can start here:

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Fingerprinting

GameboyRMH wrote: It might be possible to write a bash or python script to compare artist, title, length and format if you can find a program to extract the metadata from these audio files...if you want to "listen to it" things get more complicated, but you can start here: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Fingerprinting

This actually exists as part of monkey or at least it used to come as part of the package. I have the same issue but its 10 times the size and half of it is from recording sessions of friends or things I need to splice together, I have resigned myself to digging through it when I need something.

I have two computers with ~80 gigs of music between them. Sime from so long ago that the only data is length by unknown.

Im in the same kind if boat, so im interested in the answers.

And what kind if monkey? Was it berkeleying a football?

I used this Applescript called Dupin: http://dougscripts.com/apps/dupinapp.php but it's only for OSX. It worked pretty well but eventually I ended up re-ripping everything I could to lossless and keeping a master folder of music on a separate external hard drive as well as a mp3/aac library for syncing. Yes this means I usually end up ripping discs twice, but it's not like I'm adding 100 discs a month or anything so it's not too bad.

Was there a recent change to I-Tunes? 1/2 my stuff is gone and other things are "inaccessable" I don't use it often so who knows what I've missed.

You probably just need to point iTunes to where your files are again.

Look at scripting exiftool with awk/sed in linux to pull stuff like bitrate, sample rate, length... etc

exiftool The\ Police\ -\ Live!\ Disc\ 2\ -\ Atlanta\ -\ 01.\ Synchronicity\ I.mp3

ExifTool Version Number : 9.13
File Name : The Police - Live! Disc 2 - Atlanta - 01. Synchronicity I.mp3
Directory : .
File Size : 3.9 MB
File Modification Date/Time : 2012:03:23 19:44:23+01:00
File Access Date/Time : 2012:12:26 11:44:38+01:00
File Inode Change Date/Time : 2012:03:23 19:44:23+01:00
File Permissions : rw-------
File Type : MP3
MIME Type : audio/mpeg
MPEG Audio Version : 1
Audio Layer : 3
Sample Rate : 44100
Channel Mode : Joint Stereo
MS Stereo : On
Intensity Stereo : Off
Copyright Flag : False
Original Media : True
Emphasis : None
VBR Frames : 6660
VBR Bytes : 4044318
VBR Scale : 57
Encoder : LAME3.96
Lame VBR Quality : 4
Lame Quality : 3
Lame Method : VBR (old/rh)
Lame Low Pass Filter : 18 kHz
Lame Bitrate : 32 kbps
Lame Stereo Mode : Joint Stereo
Track : 1/15
Disc : 2/2
Artist : The Police
Title : Synchronicity I
Album : Live!
Year : 2003
Genre : Rock
Comment : Atlanta
Discid : c611270f
ID3 Size : 128
Audio Bitrate : 186 kbps
Date/Time Original : 2003
Duration : 0:02:53 (approx)

Huh, didn't know exiftool did anything but pictures...

This is a good guide: http://lifehacker.com/5266613/six-best-mp3-tagging-tools

I think I ended up using all of those tools, but had the best results after getting my folders fixed up and using Picard in Linux.

Tag&Rename was also mentioned in the comments. I tried it, but it wasn't great for what I had.

Thanks for the suggestions. I've installed Picard, hooked up an external hard drive, and set my computer to the job of moving all of the music in all the cloudy places, and all the little mobile devices into a series of folders so I can get started.

With a little luck, I should be able to get started tomorrow.

I might look into the exiftool if Picard doesn't do everything I need.

Circling back around on this to provide what ended up being the solution. Since the last post, I decided to invest in a real laptop. I've picked up a nicely spec'd MacBook, and installed Song Sargent. It cost me $20, but it cleared out a decade or so of cruft in a few minutes, so I consider it a good use of money. I still have a few more copies of my song library. I'll just import to iTunes, run Song Sargent against the library, and let it merge the tagging and normalize names.

My next step is to start fixing albums. I have a few collaboration-heavy albums that show up as five or six different albums because the track artist is inconsistent. It thinks I have an album "The Chronic by Dr. Dre" and another, different album, "The Chronic by Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Dogg" and so on. If I want to listen to Dr. Dre's The Chronic, start to finish, as an album, I can't right now.

In this case, I might just re-rip, since I still have the CD. I still often buy CDs when I really like an artist, so I have a backlog of ripping to do anyhow.

Just this little improvement in organization is nice. Thanks again for the advice.

Just a note, if you re-rip stuff, you may find that iTunes is adding that Dr. Dre feat. Snoop stuff. You can modify it before you rip it, just select the tracks you want to change and hit Cmd-I (or right click on it). You can also do this for tracks that are already in your library.

interest

I don't know how to use digital music. All my music is on albums, tapes and CD's. One day I may try to figure it out.