As one who feels a little daunted by Hydrogenaudio members knowledge and the very complex nature of Mp3's coding etc I have the following question.

Is there a tutorial or pinned thread that discusses various ways to compare several versions of a song in MP3 format.

This would include programs that test the files for integrity and quality, followed by techniques to manually compare the files via lisitening on one's computer system.

The idea is to be able to delete a lot of duplicates from my computer so I can keep my music collection in as best a condtion as I can.

Kind Regards

Digby
NZ

For manually (=subjective) comparing MP3 quality, there are various ABX programs. These programs would be completely useless if such task could be performed alone by a good software
For integrity, I don't know. Encspot has a MP3 scanner for this, but I don't know if it could automatically scann a complete folder.

EncSpot will scan the entire directory and report any errors found, provided you go into Options/Settings/Columns/General and mark the Bad Last Frame and Sync Errors checkboxes. I my experience, the Bad Last Frame error is often not audible and thus can be ignored. I aklso had some success cutting out a single sync error with mp3DirectCut. A search will turn up discussions of other apps (like MP3Utility), but I haven't tried those.

As for weeding out junk without actual listening, this is the (very rough) scheme I employ (where > stands for "preferred to"):

LAME --presets > LAME non---presets > Gogo and Fraunhofer > Xing, Blade and everything else.

While EncSpot is good for identifying the encoder and bitrate, it cannot tell what preset (if any) was used with LAME. Gambit's Mr. QuestionMan can, so you should use it in conjunction with EncSpot.

First pass I ran a generic duplicate file finder program on all my media files, and it actually checks inside for same data etc. That gets the obvious stuff out even if its spread across a couple folders.

MusicBrainz Tagger to uniformly rename and fix up all the tags, then do some sorts by song/artist and manually check dupes for complete files, low bit rates, etc.

Browse and listen, delete that junk, etc.

Main technique, keep buying bigger drives.

Thanks guys

I really appreciate your replies.

I have set up my Encsport as you suggest.

I have not found many of my files with Lame presets yet.

Kind Regards

Digby