Duplicates - automatically showing only the best version

Roon Software Discussion
1

I have two folders with music in - one has mostly .mp3 and AAC rips, the other FLAC. However, there are more albums in the .mp3/AAC folder than the FLAC one. There are a lot that are in both.

I’d like to just see the highest res. version of each album - which will usually be the FLAC one, but when it doesn’t exist will be the mp3 one, or the AAC one. Sometimes both exist.

Is there a way to show just the highest res one without doing the show duplicates and manual selecting the best one (>2000) - that will take a long, long time…

2

Use Group Alternate Versions and then select the preferred releases (I think this will default to the highest resolution anyway.)

3

[where is that to be found?]
ignore that, found it!

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4

it would be useful to be able to relax the constraints as many of my albums are slightly different lengths and marked as different but I’d rather they were there as duplicates…

5

They are therefore different releases and for many it’s an important distinction.

6

When you have a FLAC version do you even want the mp3/aac one, would it be better to actually delete these duplicate files from your library ?

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7

yes it would be easier - but with a few thousand albums, is there an automatic way to do it?

maybe focus on duplicates, and then elect mp3 format? I’ll try…

8

hmm that doesn’t work, cos if I have 2 mp3 versions and no higher res ones, deleting the mp3’s will delete the album. Just want an automatic way to do it - relaxing the grouping constraints would do it…

9

Well you could use a 3rd party tagger - Best Practice: Duplicate Finding & Deleting (FLAC library >10tb)

My own SongKong tagger is referred to in this topic, but there are other choices.

10

Have you tried the general approach of?:
Album View
Focus>Inspector>Duplicates (now shows all duplicates)
Focus>Format>FLAC (now shows all duplicates that are flac)
Then click again on the FLAC filter tag and it will change the criterion to “NOT FLAC”.
Here, you are only looking at formats that are duplicated.
Similarly you can do this with other Formats. At this point you could assign tags to the various duplicates, or delete them, or hide them (you don’t see them, but they are still in your library).
You could also create a preferred tag, and create a bookmark around that.
I would do something like a tag first before I actually deleted anything to be sure it works the way you want.

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11

thanks - but if I have ‘not Flac’ files that are the only copies, then it won’t help.

I need to select all duplicates (based on artist, title only) and merge into one record, with the best bitrate as default. Can do this manually, bur not automatically, as the duplicate detection decides that different lengths are different (which, for some purposes, is final just not in this case!).

If I delete all the not-flac duplicates, then in my e.g. I delete the 2 mp3 copies of an album I have only in mp3 format…