How do I sort through a music collection and find and categorise the best quality files?

Question

I'm looking for some software that can scan a large collection of files which contains many duplicates of varying quality in different file formats.

Ideally I would like to have a folder structure with a few levels of quality, whereby all the lossless formats like flac or ape are in one folder and the highest bitrate mp3s oggs in another. And then put all the files which are duplicates of higher quality version in a "not the best available" folder.

So far I can get a little bit close to this with MediaMonkey by sorting and moving files but it's too manual for very large collections.

Answer 1

In MediaMonkey you can browse your collection by file extension and several other criteria.

To browse by extension:

• First select the music node in the media tree at the left. This will show all the music in your collection.

• Next right click at the top of the Genre area and add a column. Right click at the top of the new column and select extension.

Now you should see all of the different file types you have in your music collection.

For the duplicates:

According to this and this MediaMonkey has the ability to detect duplicate files. It also has scripting capabilities which will allow you to automate the process. A couple of scripts to remove the duplicates are available at the above links. You could probably modify them to simply move the files to a different location and either not include them in your library, or when you are selecting the music you want to filter by extension, artist, etc. you can select the music by location and just select "all" from the main folder your high quality music is in.