DigitalVolcano Software Support

Hi,

What I'm looking to do is pretty straightforward: locate all duplicate music files across two hard drives and delete the dupes. I've managed to aggregate *lots* of duplicates over the years, due to my general sloppiness, multiple operating systems and changes in hardware, so the idea of manually doing anything with the dupes is alarming. I apparently have in the neighborhood of 4600 duplicates.

So, two questions:

Do I need the Pro version? I assume I do but would like to know why.
How do I go about the task of identifying all exact duplicates (i.e., songs that are bit-by-bit duplicates--I don't care what album they're on), then deleting them automagically?

If this can't be done, please tell me. I simply won't mark 4600 files by hand.

I think that, like me, lots of folks simply want to clean up their music collection, and if I'm right, I think lots of folks could benefit from the sort of idiot's guide I"m asking for.

Thanks,

Tom Maddox

Hi.
You can do this without Pro, though it does have tools that make some things easier (like the duplicate folder view - allows you to see where you have entire folder structures duplicated)

First you'd want to do a search for exact binary duplicates (Regular mode, same content). This will nicely catch 100% identical copies (same music, album, everything). You'll get a list showing the files sorted into duplicate groups. Here you select which copies to delete (and which to keep). If you aren't concerned which which copy to keep you can use the Selection Assistant->Mark->All but one in each group.
Next step is to delete. Click the 'File removal' button and pick a removal method. All checkmarked files will be removed.

If you have Pro you can also search by 'Audio data only'. This will compare the audio chunks of the file and ignore tags, etc. Note this only matches where the bit rate, sample rate and encoding are the same.

To catch non-exact duplicate files (eg Same song, but different album or bit rate, etc) you can search using the Audio Mode tab, with the 'Same Artist' and 'Same Title' options. Getting good results with this relies on your songs being correctly ID3 tagged. Beware of removing different songs which may have the same title (eg. "Track 1").

Remember to back up first