INTERACT FORUM

I agree,  with the amont of incorrectly tagged files .. it would really be nice if it found dupes based on other properties than file/name, etc ... a file sample would be ideal

I did find a program that is a TRM generator

aval here
http://www.musicbrainz.org/products/trmgen/download.html

they also have a tagger

http://www.musicbrainz.org/tagger/download.html

As A Test:

File 1:
G:\Pub\My_OTR_Files\P\Perry_Mason_1953_-_1954\1954-01-07 (2694) - Perry_Mason_1953_-_1954 - Dr Hall Concerned - OTR - Old Time Radio.mp3

TRM: cab0f469-b0e6-4a52-80e9-7e43e525933a

File 2:

G:\Pub\My_OTR_Files\P\Perry_Mason_1953_-_1954\1954-01-08 (2695) - Perry_Mason_1953_-_1954 - Dr Hall Concerned - OTR - Old Time Radio.mp3

TRM: cab0f469-b0e6-4a52-80e9-7e43e525933a

this seems to be a better way of finding dups than the current way of just compairing tags

There is something i do not understand:

Many of your posts tell about the many things ,many programs you cannot use because of the wma format.

So ,why do you stick to this format?

Not a judgment ,just curious.

Listening to: 'Child In Time' from 'In Rock - Anniversary Edition' by 'Deep Purple' on Media Center 10

There is something i do not understand:

Many of your posts tell about the many things ,many programs you cannot use because of the wma format.

So ,why do you stick to this format?

Not a judgment ,just curious.

Listening to: 'Child In Time' from 'In Rock - Anniversary Edition' by 'Deep Purple' on Media Center 10

Hi Zevele,

That's a thoughtful and interesting question, and I must assure you that I did indeed put a lot of consideration into my music choice.

Here's why I decided to settle upon WMA, after waiting nearly 2 years to rip my collection of 350+ CDs:

- WMA sounds FAR better than MP3 at equivalent bit rates.  I've not relied upon MS' word on this, but rather conducted my own listening tests.  After much testing, I concluded that for moderate file sizes and bandwidth and excellent audio quality, WMA VBR Normal/High offered the best balance.

- Other 'possible' formats that provide an excellent balance of listenability and file compactness, such as Ogg and MP3Pro, are not supported by anywhere near the number of Windows music players and portable players.  I'm sure I could have found my own setup (using specific software and hardware) that would have worked for ME, but I'd have been unable to easily share music files with my friends, most of whom are not geeks, and can play primarily MP3 and WMA files.

- Services that I already use and appreciate -- such as MusicMatch and Napster -- already offer downloads exclusively in WMA.   They're not gonna offer Ogg anytime soon

There ya go

s A Test:

File 1:
G:\Pub\My_OTR_Files\P\Perry_Mason_1953_-_1954\1954-01-07 (2694) - Perry_Mason_1953_-_1954 - Dr Hall Concerned - OTR - Old Time Radio.mp3

TRM: cab0f469-b0e6-4a52-80e9-7e43e525933a

File 2:

G:\Pub\My_OTR_Files\P\Perry_Mason_1953_-_1954\1954-01-08 (2695) - Perry_Mason_1953_-_1954 - Dr Hall Concerned - OTR - Old Time Radio.mp3

TRM: cab0f469-b0e6-4a52-80e9-7e43e525933a

How bout pushing this test a bit more.

try trimming 30secs/1 min of the beginning & end of the second track.

Run yout test again...how similar are the scores, cant he software tell they are the same track or not ?

Well !! did it work or not ? I'm guessing, prolly not.

was reading up on other stuff and came upon this article

interesting quotes are

variations in the MP3 encoding process will usually cause two different "rips" of a single tune from the same CD on a single computer to have two different MD5 signature.

and

Indeed, Ward of NetPD admits that the investigative service has identified nearly 90,000 different MD5 signatures on Napster for just 34 Dr. Dre tunes.

i'm not sure how musicbrainz works, but my guess is it depends on a similar hashing mechanism. So if tracks that are otherwise similar were encoded differently, they would be not be detected as dupes at all.

That article is nearly 3 yrs old. I wonder what the musicbrainz ppl have done to get around this problem.

I did a massive job on my media library recently to identify and tag duplicates.  First I used artist,name using MC's built in dups feature.  Then when these were done I found loads more by exporting my library to excel.  I did this by using a macro to remove all characters other than a-z and 0-9 from the artist and file name.  

Then I used a formula that concatenated half the artist name with half the filename e.g. =LEFT(A2,LEN(A2)/2)&LEFT(B2,LEN(B2)/2).  So:

Fleetwood Mac - You Make Lovin' Fun  becomes FleetwYouMake and
Fleetwood Mac - You Make Loving Fun also becomes FleetwYouMake.

Then in another column I do a count of how many times the new name (e.g FleetwYouMake) appears and filter the results to show anything with a count greater than 1.

It would be great if someone could build a plug in that could do something similar.  The plugin would add a tag to a custom field e.g. possible dup.  Better still would be if MC could introduce this sort of logic as an 'Advanced Duplicates' feature.

..but you're so good at these plug ins King