alistairm Posted April 4, 2013 Share Posted April 4, 2013 I have been struggling with duplicates in iTunes. I have a large library - currently around 280K songs and 1.8TB - and use it on multiple machines. I am sick of trying to eliminate duplicates from iTunes using the sort by date, Dupe Away, Audio Dedupe etc, all of which don't work properly. Can anyone recommend software to handle their library - which must be capable of handing AAC - that can easily sort out duplicates and kill the lower res files? Currently ready to move away from Apple land, having grown tired of the problems with iTunes, Apple TV crashes, freezing on wake on the Retina Pro, constant network dropouts on ipads and so on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Demondes Posted April 4, 2013 Share Posted April 4, 2013 Ahh the famous itunes duplicate issue is really hard to fix with any program in such a large library. If you trust your fixit tools too much they will delete good files, if you dont there is a lot of manual cross checking to be done. Jriver is currently being developed for mac and will hopefully be a good Mac alternative, but I don't think it will really help clean your existing library issues. The program is still in alpha phase and will likely take 1 month before it reaches a more mature application (if you can wait) I use tuneup on my Itunes Library and it has about 128K songs and is close to 4Tb. I usually remove dupes on a case by case basis when I find them. I know a lot my dupes were created by Itunes DB issues rather than myself double importing files (pre iTunes 11). I am not in a position yet to state comprehensively whether Itunes 11 DB is more stable than previous versions. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mpearce38 Posted April 5, 2013 Share Posted April 5, 2013 +1 for Jriver - Integrates with my NAS perfectly and the remote apps is fantastic, will allow you to zone your systems even play songs off your NAS on your smartphone Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acg Posted April 5, 2013 Share Posted April 5, 2013 Can't help you with the duplicates issue but I can tell you that Jriver runs rings around iTunes in the speed department. The JRiver layout is a little more conventional than apple fare and for me is more logical and easier to use. Anthony Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aechmea Posted April 5, 2013 Share Posted April 5, 2013 You could look at http://dougscripts.com/apps/dupinapp.php Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LogicprObe Posted April 5, 2013 Share Posted April 5, 2013 All mine have live in a master folder called 'wav files' It remains untouched. If I want to play around with them, I make a copy and go for it! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aechmea Posted April 5, 2013 Share Posted April 5, 2013 Sorry, a bit OT Just like prObe, all mine live in a single folder structure. Music/Pop/AlbumArtist/AlbumName/TrackNo:TrackName (for popular music) and Music/Classical/Composer/AlbumName/TrackNo:Composer:TrackName (for classical music). There is only ever 1 master copy of anything that gets in there. To play something I drag and drop a folder (=album) onto a player. To change a format or to fiddle, I make a copy and delete it when finished or knowingly introduce it to the master set with a different descriptive album name. Even more OT... I simply don't trust consumer oriented database structures and the metadata that is used to populate them. The structures are often poorly designed and the data is in many cases just plain wrong. [30 years in corporate data processing, 8 of which was as Manager Data Administration (data structures, data analysis, data element naming, database design, database performance monitoring and tuning, data backup, recovery and security architectures blah blah blah) tells me to be suspicious and wary]. I once used a music collection as a case study in a data analysis course. The final Entity Relationship Diagram is complex and can't be implemented as a flat file structure very nicely at all - which came as quite a shock to the students who thought it was going to be a piece of cake. As far as duplicates are concerned, I suspect that identifying them is a huge problem because of the age old problem of attention to detail on the part of the metadata creators. There are no rules. ie. Take just the composer field as an example. None of these data strings are the same as far as a computer program is concerned Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart WA Mozart W. A. Mozart mozart MOZART Mozart, WA Mozart, W A Mozart_W_A Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart Вольфганг Ðмадей Моцарт etc And that's but one field. That's why its so hard to actually find duplicates and why it really needs a human to decide if it is truly a duplicate or not. Best to not let duplicates get in there in the first place. Sorry again, back to normal programming. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jventer Posted April 6, 2013 Share Posted April 6, 2013 Has anyone tried mackeeper to remove duplicates? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Caconym Posted April 16, 2013 Share Posted April 16, 2013 I used Jaikoz to sort out my library it uses the songs acoustic fingerprint to identify duplicates and will also sort out the metadata. It's not perfect and you need to review the changes it wants to make but it beats doing it manually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abe Khamis Posted April 30, 2013 Share Posted April 30, 2013 Surprised that Media Monkey is not suggested. I too have 10 years worth of CD ripping and a 3TB collection of aprox 270K tracks. Have used Media Monkey for several years as the primary tool for organising my collection including album artwork and metadata. Media Monkey also has good tools for removing duplicates. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Demondes Posted April 30, 2013 Share Posted April 30, 2013 I have been trialling the Jriver Mac alpha pre release version. Apart from being still being buggy, it is much faster than iTunes 11 coupled with itunes remote. With Jremote installed on an Ipad and Jriver on a mac mini connected to a NAS library, performance is very snappy compared to my existing setup of (Itunes 11/Itunes remote combo + amarra). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LogicprObe Posted April 30, 2013 Share Posted April 30, 2013 Surprised that Media Monkey is not suggested. I too have 10 years worth of CD ripping and a 3TB collection of aprox 270K tracks. Have used Media Monkey for several years as the primary tool for organising my collection including album artwork and metadata. Media Monkey also has good tools for removing duplicates. That's a lot of files. Mine's pushing 800GB now. At least it's easy to copy to a 1TB drive at this stage........even if it takes a while! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
georgepapa Posted April 30, 2013 Share Posted April 30, 2013 (edited) Because I love Airplay i'm afraid i just must stuck with Itunes. I'ts not that bad. There's a few directory issues and I hate the way files in the music browser cannot be associated or sorted according to created playlists. I run a Western Digital NAS which backs up all of my itunes content and can also be shared across several computers in the house either as a shared Itunes directory or as a UPNP DNLA media server allawing itunes library access through a number of media players. Everything gets backed up on this whilst all the doubles and all the kids songs and the stuff I would never listen to gets regularly deleted. Hope this helps in some way. George Edited April 30, 2013 by georgepapa Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RockandorRoll Posted April 30, 2013 Share Posted April 30, 2013 No mention of Foobar in here? Its got to be up there with J River for usability. The program is so expandable and perfect for audio. Mine runs servers, transcodes, streams to Squeezebox's, sorts and labels music Once its set up, just perfect imo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LogicprObe Posted April 30, 2013 Share Posted April 30, 2013 I'm using VLC ATM..........else I use Media Player. All I want is a simple player that is easy to use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danq Posted April 30, 2013 Share Posted April 30, 2013 I use squeezeslave, which allows syncing with a squeezbox touch over wifi. Both are controlled by the logitech media server, which suits my purpose. Ripping CDs with XLD. Since using this setup, have never had trouble with deleted files. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LogicprObe Posted April 30, 2013 Share Posted April 30, 2013 This one......I take it? http://sourceforge.net/projects/softsqueeze/files/squeezeslave/squeezeslave-1.3.393/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danq Posted May 1, 2013 Share Posted May 1, 2013 Yes, that one - perhaps not the latest version. I used Squeezelite for a while also, but it did not work with the ABC Classic FM stream. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dolphy Posted May 1, 2013 Share Posted May 1, 2013 (edited) I have found that MediaMonkey is a great tool to manage your library however Foobar2000 is a better music player. I also use MediaMonkey to transfer songs from and to my iDevices Edited May 1, 2013 by dolphy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abe Khamis Posted May 1, 2013 Share Posted May 1, 2013 That's a lot of files.Mine's pushing 800GB now. At least it's easy to copy to a 1TB drive at this stage........even if it takes a while! Was sitting on over 7,500 CD's and LP's at one stage. LP collection now down to around 1000, CD's around 500 and an MP3 collection of about 270,000 tracks. Actually enjoying the digital collection now that I have finally purchased a media streaming box. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
georgepapa Posted May 2, 2013 Share Posted May 2, 2013 I guess if your an Apple person with items like Apple TV, Ipods and Iphones then your'e prettly well stuck Itunes. The program functions extremely well as a file server, though the inability to play AVI files is really annoying and quite poor. The dreaded "Unknown" and duplicate tracks can be a real pain. Apple have to work on refining their library directory and sorting capability Every CD that I extract is contained in a playlist, that way i don't get these weird references to albums duplicating 50 times. G 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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