Detect duplicate MP3 files with different bitrates and/or different ID3 tags?

python file mp3 duplicates id3
Antonio Melé picture Antonio Melé · Jan 24, 2009 · Viewed 11.3k times · Source

How could I detect (preferably with Python) duplicate MP3 files that can be encoded with different bitrates (but they are the same song) and ID3 tags that can be incorrect?

I know I can do an MD5 checksum of the files content but that won't work for different bitrates. And I don't know if ID3 tags have influence in generating the MD5 checksum. Should I re-encode MP3 files that have a different bitrate and then I can do the checksum? What do you recommend?

Answer

tzot picture tzot · Jan 24, 2009

The exact same question that people at the old AudioScrobbler and currently at MusicBrainz have worked on since long ago. For the time being, the Python project that can aid in your quest, is Picard, which will tag audio files (not only MPEG 1 Layer 3 files) with a GUID (actually, several of them), and from then on, matching the tags is quite simple.

If you prefer to do it as a project of your own, libofa might be of help.

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