Folder merge/Music management tool.

Tofystedeth

Does anybody know of a good tool for merging folders that may contain many duplicate files? My music library has about 1500 files. It's moved computers and drives with me ever since it consisted only of MP3s I downloaded over dialup in the 90s. Most of my games and my music library were copied over to my big SSD when I got it, but the old copy still remained, and there's few folders/albums that exist in one place but not the other for whatever reason*. I'm looking for tool where I can tell it to merge both folders and it will look not just at the file name and date modified, but also the contents to see if they're otherwise identical. Might run into a few cases of the same song being tagged differently, but that should be rare. Does anybody use something like this?

Jebus314

Based on your post it sounds like you already looked at backup software. Something like freefilesync. It looks at two folder structures and compares file names, date modified, and a maybe something about file details? Then you can tell it to say copy from one file structure to the other, but only if the file doesn't already exist in destination. Or if the file is newer in the source. Etc. Won't help you find duplicates inside of a single folder structure though.

itunes, if you're already using it, has a duplicate songs filter. Pretty sure it only works on song tags though, not details like file length, name, date modified, etc.

MusicBrainz Picard is a great music tagging tool. It looks at the song tags, file length, and snippets of the file itself to match your music to a huge database of music releases. You can drop in your music library and it will try and assign specific releases to each of your files. You can then have it edit all of your mp3 tags with an insane amount of details, or maybe you could just look through albums and try and find files that got matched to the same song? I haven't looked at it in a while but I don't think it has a great way of auto detecting duplicates.

Burtletoy

MusicBee can do both of those. Lots of options in its duplicate file finder. Much better than the iTunes one.

Tools > Organize Files
and
Tools > Manage Duplicates

Pretty sure I was able to remove unwanted duplicates while still leaving in, for example, songs that are identical (runtime, bitrate, name, artist) but one was on a greatest hits album and the other was on the regular album.

Tofystedeth

Thanks y'all. I think I'll take a peek a Musicbee and see if it can restore sanity to my music library.

BlindZenDriver

If you haven't already sorted out your collection, there is also a tool called "Duplicate Cleaner" and it has well functioning free version named "Duplicate Cleaner Free".