SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Duplicates issues

#1

Hi, I’m testing out the trial version of SongKong. I have tens of thousands of song files. My library is a mess with bad tags and, even worse, many duplicate files. When testing SongKong I wanted to see how it handled duplicate files. I chose a single album that is a terrible offender. For some weird reason I have as many as four versions of the same song in this album (although I only I ever added just one copy of the album originally…have no idea why there are duplicates). When I ran the remove duplicates function, it found the dupes however it chose to almost always keep the version that was tagged xxxx.mp3 2 instead of the original without the number indicating a duplicate copy (simply xxx.mp3). It did move xxx.mp3 3 and xxx.mp3 4. I have looked at all of the dates on these files (created, modified, saved, last accessed, etc) they are all identical and thus date criteria doesn’t work for finding the “original” file. All other parameters for these duplicate files is otherwise also identical. How can I get SongKong to recognize the original file (xxx.mp3) and not the one with the appended number 2 (xxx.mp3 2)?

And on a side technical note…why do these files multiply like this? It’s crazy and all over my library. I suspect iTunes played a role. And, by the way, I am doing this on a local folder…not one attached to an iTunes library at present.

#2

Not sure but if the original file is the oldest file, then on second tab of Delete Duplicates you could try in Preferred Deletion Criteria moving File Creation Date so it is above Filename in list.

Yo could also Fix Songs to rename files.

#3

I’ll look at “fix files” section. Still testing this software. As I indicated in original post, everyone of these duplicate files is EXACTLY duplicate…creation date, modified date, etc. Date is not a useful criteria for sorting these files. That was my first line of attack.

Thanks for the swift reply.

#4

Date is the same down to the second ?

#5

Yep. I mean these are -identical- clones marked 2 3 4. I checked the fix it feature and it still wanted to keep the #2 file not the original. On top of that, it wanted to split the files into two albums when it was just one (soundtrack to Armageddon by Aerosmith…has some regular Aero songs as well as songs specific to the soundtrack). Just not quite getting me there.

My library is an admitted mess. I just wish I could find a genius app that would fix it so I don’t have to manually intervene. At over 50,000 songs I would be in front of the computer for weeks otherwise. Thanks for the help. It’s a good software just not quite enough of what I need to clean up 15 years of filing mistakes. :slight_smile:

#6

Hi, okay if I may suggest I think you are going round it the wrong way round. What people usually do is run FixSongs first to identify and organize songs, then DeleteDuplicates afterwards to Delete Duplicates, Then run FixSongs again for a final clearup.

#7

Is there a way to remove duplicates but retain the highest quality file. E.G. Dark Side of The Moon in 192/24 rather than in 44.1/16

#8

Yes, on the Delete Duplicates Advanced tab you can select which duplicate is deleted based on Audio Format, Quality etc.

#9

Thank you Paul. That?s brilliant. And thank you for such a powerful piece of software.

#10

I used delete duplicates and after the 15 hours it took, it said I was on the trial version so I had to re-enter my license codes and start again. Then it stopped after about a minute and created a report where basically nothing had happened. Now I’m on my third attempt. So far 12634 songs have been loaded and 79 duplicates groups found but no duplicate songs deleted. If I look in the duplicates folder, nothing is in it (yet). Am I doing this right? I don’t want to delete the files until I have had the chance to look in the duplicates folder and ensure I don’t want them anymore. Also, I have selected duplicates according to musicbrainz, not according to metadata. I know it will take a long time as I have close to 10000 albums in my Melco library.
UPDATE: Having completed the process (in what feels like record time) songkong seems to have only found duplicate songs, not albums and it has also done some annoying weird things like split Abbey road into two albums so that I now have Abbey Road (HD) with 16 songs and Abbey Road (HD) with 1 song.

#11

Report 42 seemed to take 2 hours 40 minutes (not 15 hours) and this was in Preview mode so nothing changed.
Report 44 took 44 minutes, and I guess it was quicker because the songs had already been loaded into database so it didnt have to read from disck to find out if they were duplicates

At the end of the day Delete Duplicates is comparing songs not albums, but do want to improve the report to make it more album centric ( and indeed Alan AInslie form Melco has requested this)

So instead of listing the Abbey Road just as a list of songs, they would be grouped by folder.

So it seems you had two versions of Abbey Road:
/Volumes/share/import_Mac/The Beatles/Abbey Road
/Volumes/share/import_USB/all/CHARLES BECKERSON CLEANED/CHARLES HIRES and DSD from Alan/PCM3/BEATLES HD DEMOS/Abbey Road

In your Preferred Deletion Criteria, your first criteria is audio format and aif is listed above flac so that is why aif is kept and flac moved.
I can see duplicates were found for Tracks 1-8 and 10 to 17 but not track 9

So it seems to be the issue is that the only BEATLES HD DEMOS/Abbey Road version actually had track 9, and therefore this has been left, and all the others deleted since they were the duplicate of the better quality one.

Could SongKong do better here ?

Perhaps we could add a CompleteAlbum critera so that if that was at top of the Preferred Deletion Criteria list it would delete the aif files because unlike the flac they don’t have a complete album, but then if your collection was aif rather than mp3 you would not want the mp3 version kept, this could be ovecome if we also had a isLossless rule.

Does that make sense