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[DeltaT]

Hello, Please can someone help me?

I have copied over all my music to MC12, how can I remove Duplicate tracks from the Root and remove from the drive also.

I'm sorry if this has been asked before, I did try the search but only seems to show smart list.

Many Thanks

[eba]

Hi,

Will arrange this post in order of increasing complexity:

1.  Basic find of duplicates:
Type into search box: ~dup[Name],[Artist]
MC will display all copies of all duplicated songs.

2.  To only show one copy of each one so that you can then delete the one copy:
Create a smartlist with two modify rules:
only duplicates of Name and Artist (plus anything else if you want to filter further)
remove duplicates of Name and Artist
The smartlist will show one copy of each song.  You could then delete these files, then refresh to show more if there are multiple duplicates of some, and delete again.  This of course will indiscriminately delete songs.

3.  To show the lowest quality copy of each duplicate:
In between the only duplicates and remove duplicates rules:
Sort by [bitrate]

4.  To make sure you don't delete the copies you do want (eg, if they're part of albums you want to keep together rather than just random songs), you could:
Create a playlist, put in all the songs that you want to keep, then add a rule to your duplicates smartlist to say Playlists is not any...


5.  I have a set of smartlists for duplicates, so that I can remove them from any other smartlists as such:

Duplicates:
Only duplicates of [Artist],[Name],[live]*
Sort by [Artist],[Name],[Approximate Duration]*,[Bitrate]

Duplicate Keeps:
Only duplicates of [Artist],[Name],[live]
Sort by [Artist],[Name],[Approximate Duration],[Bitrate]
Remove duplicates of [Artist],[Name],[live]

Duplicate Removals:
Playlists is all: Duplicates
Playlists is not: Duplicate Keeps

*[live] is a custom field which I just put a number in if the track is not the standard studio version, therefore not removing alternate versions of songs.
[Approximate duration] is a custom field calculated as =formatduration([duration]).  Allows me to remove shorter versions of songs, without selecting a 128kbps copy instead of a 256kps just because it was 2 seconds longer...

Sorry have probly gone into far more detail than you really wanted here, but, point being, you can create smartlists as such to make sure you can remove the not so good copies of songs and keep the better ones, whether deleting them altogether or just stopping them being played.  Why do you want to delete the duplicates altogether?  It's generally nice to at least keep albums complete if possible, so if you've got compilation albums with them in it's usually best to leave them there.

Hope it helps (some of it at least) anyway

[fitbrit]

Thanks, eba, I'm bookmarking theis thread for when I'm ready to migrate from iTunes.

[eba]

  No problem...except

for when I'm ready to migrate from iTunes.

when you're ready?  Is this some kind of personal challenge to see just how long you're capable of putting up with it for?

I reinstalled it 6 months or so ago myself, to see if it was as bad as I remembered it as being, or to see if it had improved at all in the 2 years since I'd last used it.  The answers were yes and no respectively.
Last week, was doing a bit of a clear up of my hard disk, and found a copy of MJ8, and installed that.  Was quite nice to see how everything had evolved, and how basic things seemed in comparison to MC12 (3 non definable custom fields?...tree being the only method of navigation?...), yet was still far better than iTunes...

[fitbrit]

No, I mean when I'm ready as in I have the time to figure out exactly what I have to do to export my playlists etc. so that MC will recognise them. I accidentally deleted the contents of a NAS a few weeks ago, that I had backup movies on... as well as my up to date iTunes library. So I'm using a back up now, and much of it is missing the original files, which will need to be reripped or found elsewhere on my drives.
I'm convinced that MC will do a tighter job (by far) with my songs. While I'm here, can MC take songs/playlists from an iPod? My iPod does have a more recent version of my songs library than my hard drives do!

[KingSparta]

Was quite nice to see how everything had evolved, and how basic things seemed in comparison to MC12

Trying to give power users the tools and keeping it simple for new users has always been a problem since after MJ6, when more and more options for users were added.

My wife uses MC12, and if she can anyone can if the user takes the time.

[itschrismck]

EBA....  Thanks for detailed info on locating duplicates. Big help for me.

Chris