Page 1 of 1

How do I find similar music files?

PostPosted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 4:32 pm
by MediumRare
This is a bit off topic for a board on optical media, but I've seen so much good advice on this board that I'll ask anyways. Maybe someone has an answer or can point me to another site with more information.

I want to find "near duplicate" music files among those I have on my hard drive. I don't mean identical files, but similar ones. Ideally, I'd like to match a rip from a cassette tape (with wow and limited frequency range and/or incorrect Dolby settings etc.) with the original from a CD.

This means that the following properties should be (more or less) ignored in the comparison:
- leading and trailing silence
- amplitude (volume)
- minor speed variations
- restrictions in frequency range

Does anyone know of a program that can do such comparisons? It should be able to handle a large number of files (ca. 1000) without bogging down and ideally have configurable comparison criteria.

All I've found so far is similarity. However, the standard comparison there is too simple- it's easily fooled by similar instrumentation and chokes on the "cassette" test. The experimental advanced option is a bit better, but extremely slow. Further, there is no real restart or export option available and documentation is non-existant.

Any suggestions?

G