With growing mp3 music collection we often end-up with duplicate tracks taking-up space on our disk-drives, some of the files we have copied, some of them we have downloaded multiple times and some we have converted from other sources. De-duplicating your music collection and maintaining it in order manually requires hours or even days of work to check all the folders and keep the ones with the best quality, luckily we have automated software to do this task with ease.

One such commercial application is Audio Dedupe which can handle this situation easily and precisely, the software is capable of recognizing duplicate audio files even if they are not marked with ID3tags and are stored in different file formats. This is not just a standard duplicate file finder as Audio Dedupe will actually listen to the music files and recognize if the song is the same as the others stored in different formats. It can check MP3, MP2, MP1, MPA, WAV, OGG, AIFF, AAC, MP4, FLAC, AC3, WavPack (WV), Musepack (MPC) and Windows Media Audio (WMA) file formats and allows you to clean up the duplicates to save valuable drive space.

Once you add the folders to be scanned you can choose the similarity percentage in order to narrow or broaden your search results and start the scan. In the folders panel you can also exclude some folders from the auto-check feature. This is handy if you would like to preserve the files in some "'source"' folder(s).

If you use iTunes you must be experiencing issues like duplicate tracks, dead media links and tracks without meta-information in your music-library, sadly iTunes does not provide a proper way to get rid of these issues easily and we have to rely on third-party utilities like Teridons iTunes Script to declutter your iTunes media library, now a better and easier to use free alternative is available which lets you not only remove missing and duplicate tracks but also auto-rate and fetch missing meta-information for your music collection.

meta-iPod could be considered as an swiss-army knife for iTunes with all the must-have functionality to clean your iTunes music library, the software is very easy to use and is actively developed with new features getting added fast.