[ast3r3x]

Ok, so when I switched to my new macbook pro a few months ago I copied my mp3s over and gave my old powerbook to my sister to use. Since then I've extended my collection nearly 10gb worth of music. Now, I recently had my external HD fail, which had my current collection of mp3s on. I probably lost 20-30gb I think.

I was wondering if anyone has any ideas on how to merge what I was able to recover from my current collection, and from my old collection, without ending up with a ridiculous amount of duplicates I have to wade through. I was trying to think of a unix command to recursively scrub the directories of a drive and move all the files with .mp3 .aac, .m4a, .m4p to one big folder. Relying on the fact that most songs wouldn't have the same name, and most that do would probably be duplicates. Does anyone know how to do this, or have better ideas?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, life without music is worse than life without computers.

[tomoe]

If your duplicates have the same file size & checksum, you might try fdupes; it's pretty straightforward to use. I had a problem similar to yours awhile ago and managed to snag a good chunk (though definitely not all) duplicate music files using it (e.g. two copies of the same song, but in different formats).

[ast3r3x]

Oh, that looks awesome, thanks for the advise! Now I just have to get all my mp3s in one one drive I guess. Thanks again, I'm excited now.

[ast3r3x]

It's working like a charm by the way!

However, I just wanted to add a few words to help bring this up in search results, and share a helpful piece of code I found on the internet. First of all the keywords

files file merge folders duplicates

That's done now to what makes this program useable if you are like me and have 4500 duplicates. Instead of having to pick which file you want to keep for each one, it's possible to just have it keep the first or second file of each group.

"yes 1 | fdupes -rd /path/to/directory"

The yes command just repeats whatever you tell it to it seems while a program is looking for input. Saves your fingers, and time if you are like me and have a large number of results.