After exploring these music analysis tools a bit further, I can now declare my preference for Mindgems' Audio Dedupe. Its results were spot-on accurate, illuminating multiple duplicate songs I didn't know existed in my collection of approximately 10,000 songs. For example, it seems Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock had the same song entitled "Picture" on each of their respective albums. Who knew? Apparently not me because I have two copies of the same song, albeit at different bitrates.
In accordance with MindGems' policy at
http://www.mindgems....dio-Dedupe-About.htm :
The Demo version of Audio Dedupe is not trial, but with the following limitations:
You cannot delete or move the selected duplicate files using Move or Delete Selected buttons.
You cannot use Open with Associated Program and Locate in Explorer popup menu items.
You cannot Save/Load projects.
I also tried the two freeware tools noted above, and I can only give my opinion: they're still too beta-ish to be useful. Since Similarity is updated fairly regularly and really looks promising, I intend to watch its development carefully.
@Curt: 40,000 songs? Wow, that's a substantial music collection. Audio Dedupe analyzed 10,000 songs in roughly 45 minutes on XP, 32-bits, 4 GB, E6850. Unless Audio Dedupe unpredictably grinds to a halt, I would expect it to easily complete 40,000 files over the course of one day/night, certainly not an entire week.
Also, the freeware Duplicate Cleaner at
http://www.digitalvo...nt/duplicate-cleaner cites the ability to "Deep scan music formats - mp3, wma, flac, ogg, ape, etc", but all it does for me is crash when I attempt to scan music files on an external HD.
Without actually testing the program, I cannot say what "deep scanning" really means (ie. how advanced is this software?). In any event, others may have better luck with Duplicate Cleaner so I'll pass along the info FWIW.