INTERACT FORUM

More => Old Versions => Media Center 12 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: winterminute on September 25, 2007, 07:36:45 pm

Title: Can MC Help Me Weed Out Duplicates?
Post by: winterminute on September 25, 2007, 07:36:45 pm
I've been toying with MC on and off for the last few years, but never really bought into it.  I'm too smart for WMP and it drives me crazy every time I want to do something advanced so I figured I'll get serious about MC.

One of the first tasks is to weed out dupes.

For a couple of reasons, I have some duplicates in 10,000 song library.  All of my songs are tagged using WMP's tagging (via AllMusic.com) so I have a pretty good chance of the artist/title being the same.  Ideally, there would be some way I could tell MC to keep the highest bitrate MP3.  Which means if the same song exists in MP3 and WMA, then mark the WMA for deletion.  I'd also like to be able to do manual approval for delete once I have the dups and the suggested deletions.

Is this possible with MC?  If so, how would I go about setting this up?
Title: Re: Can MC Help Me Weed Out Duplicates?
Post by: dcwebman on September 26, 2007, 08:26:43 am
Sounds like you need to create a Smartlist to list possible duplicates and then it's a manual procedure. Like I just posted in another question, here's a smartlist that you can start with:

[Media Type]="audio" ~dup=[name],[artist] ~sort=[artist],[name],[bitrate]

In your case, I added sorting by bitrate too so that the highest bitrate will be the last one shown in the artist/name combination.
Title: Re: Can MC Help Me Weed Out Duplicates?
Post by: steveklein on September 26, 2007, 08:46:45 am
Sounds like you need to create a Smartlist to list possible duplicates and then it's a manual procedure. Like I just posted in another question, here's a smartlist that you can start with:

[Media Type]="audio" ~dup=[name],[artist] ~sort=[artist],[name],[bitrate]

In your case, I added sorting by bitrate too so that the highest bitrate will be the last one shown in the artist/name combination.


yeah i was gonna give this advice, but it is still going to be very manual... because you may have live recordings that you want to keep that have identical artist and name fields. similarly, this won't fix the dupes if one ID3 tag says a song is "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" and others say "Dont Go Breaking My Heart" or "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart"
Title: Re: Can MC Help Me Weed Out Duplicates?
Post by: edbro on September 26, 2007, 09:18:10 am
this won't fix the dupes if one ID3 tag says a song is "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" and others say "Dont Go Breaking My Heart" or "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart"
If they say "Don't go breaking my heart", in any form, they should all be deleted anyways.  ;D
Title: Re: Can MC Help Me Weed Out Duplicates?
Post by: winterminute on September 27, 2007, 12:14:11 am
Thanks - The smartlist seems to work just fine.  Now I have 500+ tracks to weed through :)
Title: Re: Can MC Help Me Weed Out Duplicates?
Post by: saab05 on October 25, 2007, 04:54:28 am
deleting dupes seems unnecessarily complicated, and it is a problem that will keep coming up for those of us who have both media center library and iTune libraries. It sounds like the way to do it would be to  put all the thousands of your songs in one playlist and then try the delete duplicate function. But in all honestly it only works half the time of playlists no more than 30 items