Flac, MP3, M4A comparison

[MadTiroler]

Many thanks for your help in advance. I´m pretty new with this really good comparison software.

May task is the following:

I have two big audio data bases with a lot of files on different hard discs. These are FLAC, MP3 and M4A files. Both of them are around 100.000 files and a lot of these files are the same, but with different file names and sometimes in different folders as well. Now I want like to merge both data bases into one, without getting double files.

The ID tags of songs name and interpreter / band are very similar.

Has somebody any idea how to figures this out?

Take care to all.

[Aaron]

Hello,

BC4 can load two locations at once to help consolidate multiple sources to a single destination. The file names and structure changing will make this a tricky consolidation, however.

If the file names differ, these files would not align and would be marked as a difference as Orphans. We have the ability to align different file names manually or using a regular expression/mask, but this requires knowing how the file names changed. We do not have a content scan to help with the alignment; the content scan occurs after alignment.

Folders can be ignored with the View menu -> Ignore Folder Strucutre. However, the file names would still need to be equal to align, and there shouldn't be any duplicate file names on the same side in any subfolder.

[Chris]

On a separate note from your request, while Beyond Compare doesn't currently support comparison of tags in FLAC files, it's something we're working on a for a future version of the MP3 compare. Note that when implemented it will be limited to comparing the tags of a pair of FLAC files.

If you have a pair of example FLAC files you'd like to compare, please send them to [email protected] and I'll pass them on to the developer working on FLAC tag comparison.

[Qboy61]

FLAC tag/content comparison will be a welcomed addition to Beyond Compare. My collection of music is more FLAC than MP3 currently. The MP3 tag/content is wonderful in this day of software applications that have to add tiny "tidbits" to the file for their own use making them different sizes and different from a bit-to-bit comparison. But there is a not so obvious (and possibly difficult) content comparison here for FLAC. While MP3 file content can be compared via binary data, FLAC files are sometimes different (their binary data may be different) yet when the two files are decoded to uncompressed data the actual waveform information has no difference (I've done this with a home-brew tool in Matlab). Not sure how BC"X" would handle this.

PS. Hope the "X" is 4 ;-)

[Aaron]

Thanks for the feedback. If you have any sample files that exhibit this behavior, it'd be appreciated to expand our test cases. ([email protected])

[sunk818]

There's another program called Similarity which is likely what you want. It performs acoustic and image analysis provides a match score. It has the fuzziness which is important for your type of duplication detection: http://www.similarityapp.com/

My apologies to the forum administrator if this link is offensive.

The product is likely more appropriate for your use case. I use Beyond Compare everyday and think it is an excellent tool for file comparisons, but currently lack good fuzzy matching tools for images, audio, and video.

[Aaron]

Hello,

No problem. While it's a little frowned upon to post direct links with a lot of overlap, this app's focus appears to offer a feature set that we don't currently support.

[Qboy61]

Aaron,

Any status updates on FLAC support in BC? Still excited to see a beta of this.

[Chris]

FLAC support in the MP3 Compare is planned for a future version of BC but it doesn't have a scheduled release date.