MusicIP Mixer Help - Dealing with Duplicate Songs

You can use the MusicIP Mixer to find duplicate songs in your collection. This will only work for songs which have been fingerprinted, because it will only show songs which have the same acoustic sounds. Currently, this is a premium feature, meaning you will need a registration key.

To use this feature, select Library/List Duplicates. This will list all the songs that appear more than once in your library. This is helpful in weeding out songs which you would like to delete. Once you have one or more songs selected which you would like to deleted, press Ctrl-D (Cmd-Del on Mac) and you can remove them from your cache. To also remove them from disk, select the "Remove From Disk" checkbox. Where possible, these files will be moved to the Trash or Recycle folder rather than immediately deleted. To be safe, though, you should consider this a non reversible action.

Tips

You might want to see more information about the songs when you are deciding which songs to keep and which to delete (if any). You can add, remove, or reorganize the columns visible in the song list to include bit rate, file size, or just about anything else. On Mac, select View/View Columns..., or right-click on the headers of the song list. On Linux and Windows, use the File/Customize Options menu and select the Playlist section.

If you want help in deciding which songs to delete, you can use the Mark Duplicates power tools. This will mark all but one of each unique song, preferring to keep the "best" version of each song. If you use this option, please review the choices before deleting any songs.

If you don't want some songs to show up in your duplicate list, you can right-click on the songs in the duplicate list and select Ignore This Duplicate. For instance, you might have the same song as part of two different albums, but you don't want to delete either song. If you later want to reset the status of ignored duplicates, you can do so from the General section of the Preferences panel. (This will also show how many songs are currently marked.)

Other Notes

Sometimes you might see songs which are not exactly what you expected - either songs which seem to be incorrectly marked as duplicates, or not seeing duplicates which you expected to see. Although it's rare that you will get anything other than the expected answer, there is still a bit of an art to the process of fingerprinting.

For instance, if you have song A and song B which are copies of the same recording, but song B was significantly remastered, these songs might be considered different, as they will have different attributes describing them. If you have song A and song B which are different recordings (perhaps even different artists) of the same song, but they sound quite similar, these may be identified as duplicates. For the MusicIP Mixer, the key issue is that any songs sharing the same fingerprint must also share the same analysis data.

Another rare possibility is that since the fingerprints only look at the first two minutes of each song, if the songs differ only after the first two minutes, these will always be considered the same. Different language versions of the same song will also generally be considered duplicates, as will remixes with only trivial changes.

For advanced users, you can try tweaking the sensitivity of the fingerprint matching. This requires passing a command line option, and only works with Linux and Windows currently. Increasing the threshold (by passing, for instance, -fp 1.2, will allow you to find more large-scale duplicates (i.e. remasters of the same song), but will also cause some non-duplicates to be marked as duplicates.