Music library?

[Tilda]

Ok, I have a dilemma and am interested in hearing what you folks do with your music.

Is there a program that will go through two different folders and merge them into one, so there are no duplicate songs.

Most of my music comes from iTunes, or ripped off CD's. The itunes stuff I play through tunebite so that it removes the copy protection. I then get a 3rd folder with itunes stuff encoded as mp3's.

Is there a program that will go through all 3 folders of music, and merge them all together into one nice happy folder so I dont get duplicate songs etc?
Is there a plugin for winamp or wmp or something to help with this? I like the functionality of itunes but dont like the duplicate songs etc.

 

[Skyler]

If you're talking about on an iPod then EphPod is your answer (should be Ephpod.com or something).

If you're not talking about that then err... Windows Explorer?

 

[Paradroid]

What if the MP3s have different sizes due to the sampling/encoding quality?

 

[Tilda]

well exactly, or have names like "songname_1" yet is infact exactly the same as "songname" in the same folder.

 

[Skyler]

I don't know of any automated program to do something like that. You may find something on SourceForge, but there are thousands and thousands of programs to look through.

 

[MYstIC G]

http://musicbrainz.org/ is probably your best bet.

 

[Shovel]

iTunes itself will do it to a point (with some manual intervention required, though you might be able to find a script that'll help)

I'll assume you're using the Windows version, so go to Edit -> Preferences and under advanced you'll see the location of your iTunes music library. You'll also see an option for ‘Keep my music library folder organised’, as well as ‘Copy new files to my library’*(or labels to that effect). I'm not sure if you need to enable them or not. Keep…organised renames your files into Artist folder/Album folder/Track file name.ext, so might not be your cup of tea, but I'm not sure if the next step depends on it or not.

Second step: In tunes click ‘Advanced’ and then ‘Consolidate Library’. This copies all your songs stored outside your iTunes library directory into it, thereby putting all your files into a single folder for you. You can check this by right clicking some files you know were in the other folder beforehand and choosing Get Info, listed in there will be the physical file path.

Third step (some manual intervention required). Click View -> Show Duplicates. Now you'll have a list of duplicate songs based on Artist and Song name (I think). Now, that obviously isn't flawless; if you've got a live version of something that has the exact same track name as the album version it'll flag as a dupe, so be somewhat careful here.

Right click on the columns at the top of the track listing table and add the ‘Kind’ column, you should see what format each of the tracks is. You can then sort by Kind and delete the format versions that you don't want. It'll prompt you to move to the Recycle Bin or just to remove from the library when you do so.

At this point I run out of knowledge. On the Mac (sorry), iTunes is easily extendable with scripts which could generate better Duplicate Track playlists and even automatically delete certain files. I'm not aware of the same thing being possible with the Windows version so i think your cleanest bet will be sorting by Kind and selecting all to delete (being aware of those Live track anomalies mentioned above).

Hope that helps.

 

[Tilda]

Thanks Shovel, thats fantastic, thanks