OK here's a review of 0.0.8
This build seems quite stable , i fed it 1908 files and it worked well, no crashes nothing. switching between plugin view & other view schemes stops the plugin but on returning to the plugin view and clicking on batch start resumes where it left off.
Settings
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replace Text (Tab) ( find & and replace with And)
Remove text (artist field & song field ,remove text between)
used "(" and ")" in the two red boxes
These settings are important and are recommended.
Results with 1908 files
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MC's finds 157 duplicates on its own.
using just MD5TextHash in Duplicates found 294 files.
JLee's macro found 303.
So Kings plugin is pretty close. Some tweaking in the replace tabs might fix this.
(Not surprisingly. just tried this out to see what came up)
- using MD5MP3Hash in duplicates found 4 files.
- using MD5BinHash in duplicates found 8 files.
The above 2 hashes are useful when tagging is inaccurate or non-existent, BinHash being more useful as it only samples a few kb from the beginning rather than the whole file.
Otherwise texthash does the trick pretty well, for extra speed, the other hashes could be unchecked in the plugin setup.
Suggestions
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- i found the MD5TexHash to be the most useful, it found nearly twice as many dupes as MC on its own but the downside is the waiting for the text hashes to be computed. Maybe i am impatient because i don't know the ideal settings to use for the replace text, etc tabs and unwilling to wait to see the results of any experiments. It took 4 hrs to do all the hashes for 1908 files on a 700Mhz P3.
I suppose once the ideal settings are known, the text hash computation is a one time operation.
It would be ideal if it did not require this extra step and performed the dupe checking just given a playlist.
But i'm not sure how to display the results then in the familiar fashion using the Duplicates modifier. Something needs to be written to a tag to be able to use this modifier.
I'm not aware of how much the SDK exposes ( and whether its feasible) but a possible solution might be to do the text compares internal to the plugin, store the results and then pass them to a pre-defined smartlist.
- Suggestion for a new feature, given a track list for an album, find all existing files. This could be helpful when looking at new albums on the web to see how many of the album tracks were already in the library. User would just copy+paste a track list of the web into a tabbed window and the plugin would display any matches.
Well done King and thanks for the effort !