aa1037

ok so here is the scenario: 6 people in a house, each with their own pc. we'll have a central computer runnin win2003 and are sharing a folder on there with tons of music in it. what I want to be able to do, when dumping music on there (especially in huge chunks at the beginning), is be able to filter out some of the duplicate files.

to clarify: is there any software available that does "heuristic" (i guess you could call it) file search and replacement.

for example: snoop dogg - gin and juice.mp3 is thrown onto the music server by person a. person b tries to throw on snoopdogg-gin and juice.mp3. obviously, they are the same song, but windows would allow them to both exist in the same folder. is there any software that could recognize this type of similarity and filter accordingly?

R3d

afaik there isnt any program that could do that.. if there is.. id love to use it as well lol..

if the file names are different then it could be a little tricky.. but if they're the same.. then possibly..

heyal256

I dunno how feasable this idea is, but maybe you need to run all the mp3 files on the server through an mp3 renamer and then have it rewrite the filenames to some sort of standard. This does assume that the id3 tags are correct (probably not but you never know). i would think that if you had duplicate files it would show up as songname(1), songname(2), etc. and then you just need to look for the files with the (#) and delete.

Of course this is just an idea and I have NO clue how well this would work depending on the mp3 files, mp3 renaming program, etc.

TheProf

One possibility is that identical songs will have identical filesizes. This does assume that you are dealing with 2 songs that have been encoded at the same rate. If that's the case, then you can do a directory listing sorting the files by size, print it out, and look for files that have exactly the same number of bytes.

FloydianOne

This doesnt seem too difficult to create, as long as you make a program that you will use to transfer mp3s on your network... hook it up to a database on the server that contains file names and filesizes... then do a cross check. Sure it might not be incredibly accurate and it would probably have some mistakes but it would get the job done. Now we just need a programmer..... programming forum?

Rlyss

I think you guys should all just agree on a format for naming the songs before you dump them in the shared folder. If you all agree that they should be Artist - Title or something (Snoop Dogg - Gin and Juice.mp3 for example) and rename them before putting them in the shared folder then it should work out. If there's a song there already with the same name then it'll ask if you want to overwrite it, and then you decide if you want to.

sob

Don't know if this helps, but you can eliminate duplicate files (even if they have different names) by using a freeware program called "clonespy."

It's great for cleaning up porn collections, too.

aa1037

thanks for all the suggestions, guys. i'll let you know what solution we use