What are Duplicate Files?

In Duplicate Cleaner, there are several classes of Duplicate file (or dupe) that you can find:

Files with same content (MD5)

These files are exact content duplicates (though they may have different names). Duplicate Cleaner uses an MD5 hash to identify alike files - this is a kind of fingerprint for the file.  Eg:

From the table above we can see that Invoice.pdf and Invoicebackup.pdf are duplicates as they have the same hash, and it may be safe to delete one of them. In Duplicate Cleaner these two files would be put into the same group.

Files with the same Name, Date or Size

These files have identical filenames, date or size. This comparison is not case sensitive.  These criteria can be combined in various combinations.

Music Duplicates

Using the Audio Search setting in Duplicate Cleaner allows you to compare files using their audio tags (the artist/song name etc which shows up in your media player).  You may compare by Artist, Title or Album, though many more attributes are displayed in the final results to help you decide which files to remove.  Note this search doesn't compare the content of the audio files, just the tags.

Currently supported formats are MP3, WMA, M4A, M4P, OGG, APE and FLAC.