15-Minute Reviews :: MP3 Duplicates Finder v2.5

Hello everyone and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is MP3 Duplicates Finder version 2.5 by AbeeTech – An application which uses the tags of MP3s to remove duplicate MP3s in your collection.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“The purpose of this specialized program is to find all music duplicates on your computer and remove useless files from your hard drive. As this program performs just this single task it copes with it much better than other more universal programs. Unlike the other programs for duplicate files search, our program works only with mp3, wma, ogg and m4a files. This allows using specific methods for duplicates detection.

While most of universal duplicates finders use such criteria as file size and file name, this program uses the artist name and title of the composition from ID3 tag for comparison. If the mp3 file doesn’t have filled tags, the program tries to determine such information from the file name.”

Quick Pros

• Wizard-style interface easy to use and get running
• Two options for how to search – Duplicates as well as duplicates and similar
• Search speed is decent – I had no issues with mismatches based on tags
• Preview functionality handy to see if it is truly same file
• Ability to open previous scan to continue working through duplicates

Quick Cons

• Relies heavily on only the tags of the files
• Recommends downloading a pay application to complete its task
• Crashes frequently upon startup
• Application very slow to exit

Expansion

While I do not have a sizable MP3 collection, I know there are plenty of people out there with huge collections of music, and duplicates is one of the hardest parts of these collections to combat. Whether it’s manual techniques (Hearing a duplicate and going to find it), or automated systems like this, there is room on the market for ways to cut down on drive usage and annoying duplicates.

Normally I do start on the positive, but the startup crash bug is really bad. I am lucky to get the application to start once in three attempts; During the splashscreen is where it crashes. Sometimes I get an application error message (See below); sometimes I get no error and it shuts itself off; Other times I get the Windows application error report window and it’ll close itself; Other times I have to force it closed even after I get the Windows application error report window. Here’s the application error I get:

Abee MP3 Duplicates Finder – application error Download the latest version of program, may be this bug was fixed Access violation at address 00404E8E in module ‘Mp3DuplicatesFinder.exe’. Read of address 3BFFFFF8.

When you do get it to open one of the many times I try to launch, it doesn’t look bad. The wizard-style interface is pretty handy and easy to understand. If it is the first time you’ve scanned, the application will give you the option to scan for only identically-tagged MP3s, or ones which are similar, which will hit remixes, alternate versions, etc so long as their ID3 title is similar. I recommend checking any results through the preview (Which launches by default into Windows Media Player) to make sure you’re not deleting truly unique music; This is especially true with the duplicate and similar option. The preview function is helpful so you don’t end up ripping apart your entire music collection.

I found the search speed was relatively quick. It appears that it preloads the tags and then compares them all. I am sure as you test a larger and larger collection, that your speed will slow down quite a bit as it has a lot more files to compare. What is handy as well is that once you are finished searching, you don’t have to finish checking all of its work; The next time you launch the application, you have the option to open the previous scan and continue working through it; This may be helpful for someone who wants to scan a huge collection now, and then work on the results later.

While this application does work pretty well, it relies on the tags alone; If you don’t have your MP3s tagged well, it will resort to the filename; If the filenames aren’t built well (IE:- different formatting filenames) it will likely not catch your files well. This is an inherent flaw with using tags and not so much an issue with using tag-based duplication removal. There has been MP3 fingerprint-based duplication removal tools too, but they seem to have their own inherit flaws as well. When I ran it on my small collection, I didn’t realize two of my CDs had the same song, but it caught it. The selection box is pretty easy to use too to ensure you have the right version of the song you want to get rid of, if you want to get rid of it.

One part that did irritate me was that the application recommends you download a separate tool to tag empty-tagged files in a huge dialog box with large font in bold lettering right after scanning – It gives you a direct link to the application with no link to information on the application. The part it doesn’t tell you is that the application (MP3 Tag Assistant Pro) is a separate program which is $34.95.

Final Verdict

While the concept behind this application is pretty handy, and works pretty well; The issue here is that while it is free, the crash bug is not good; It does worry me on what it is crashing on, and why there is three different crash scenarios. While I do not know if this bug would affect the application’s capability to search accurately, I would be cautious on the results. For free, you can give it a try to see if you have the same crashing issues. The application isn’t stellar, but it works pretty well so long as you’ve kept up on your MP3 tags and you don’t have to deal with this annoying crashbug (If it is isolated.) As for paying $19, the crash bug would definitely have to be fixed before I even think of suggesting to pick up the application, as well as the annoying dialog pup-up recommending another pay-for application every time I scan my files.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, June 27, 2007