My digital music collection isn't particularly organised. It's primarily made up of tracks sourced from my CDs and a number of tracks downloaded from iTunes. However, I have a bad habit of using various computers (with the same iTunes account) to obtain the tracks. Due to the way iTunes is managed, you can't synchronise your own tracks between your computers. You have to either share your collection or manually move them between your machines. It's easy to get confused, duplicate tracks and more.
Factor in tracks you may have, ahem, sourced online from the old Napster days (especially those old impossible-to-buy live tracks that we were released to fans or recorded by fans), it's far too easy to end up with multiple tracks, often with different suffixs, many of which can be deleted.
Similarity 0.8.2 is a free tool that will scan your music collection and check for duplicate files. Particularly the same tracks recorded with different codecs. You can then choose which files you want to delete (ie. old MP3 tracks replaced with newer AAC-encoded tracks).
Similarity 0.8.2 link.
27 May 2009
