Hello again!
No worries on timing. I can be patient. I could quite possibly be remembering things incorrectly, but I thought we had created a solution that avoided having to have the same track, album and even time because my goal back then was to have one copy of the song, whether it came from the original album or a greatest hits, and sometimes the cut on the
greatest hits would be 3-5 seconds longer/shorter than the original. So while I did use deduper to get rid of exact duplicates, I was also using it, perhaps more so, for replacing versions/masterings of songs in playlists with a better
version. Since I have any playlists, this saved me a bunch of work, making things that perhaps would not be feasible time-wise into reality.
Again, perhaps I not remembering correctly, but I remember a step where the duplicates would be found and then being able to check and uncheck items to signal which tracks to keep in playlists and which to remove. I do a lot of complicated stuff in different programs and I almost always write notes to remember but it does not seem that I did so this time, possibly because I thought I could reference back to the treads. I do remember have 2 separate threads on deduper due to this forum's approach of archiving old threads and forcing users to create new ones. Unfortunately, only one thread shows up in my search and even when checking my profile I can only see 3 of the 14 threads I have started, so I guess I will copy the threads from now on for reference. I am sorry about this.
Basically what I looking to do is this:
“After using Deduper and realizing all the options within the script itself, I can't help but wonder how difficult it would be to add the option of having the script disregard Track number, Album, Time as matching characteristics. If these could be set to true or false then the potency of the script would increase dramatically and one could use it to remove all sorts of duplicates, including all the varieties I was trying to eliminate. It would also eliminate all the work of having to rename the album, disk and track numbers when you want to remove a duplicate that exists on another album.” (Looking for help on deduper by turingtest… - Apple Community)
“… I think this can be thought of as adding criteria to the duplicate search. By doing this you can make your script find any type of duplicate.
The script should ask: Do you want a duplicate to be considered a duplicate if X set of factors are satisfied: be it Title and Artist (Can track duplicates across Albums, compilations, anthologies) ; Just Title (Maybe you just want one version of a song); Title, Artist & Album (What the script currently does); Time & Title (Track Duplicates across albums, comps, anthologies even if artist name is inconsistent which can happen with different spellings or different ways to list or not list feat. artists); Title and Album (In case Artist is not consistent), Album Artist (In case the Artist is not consistent or one uses Album Artists as Artist to keep songs unified in consolidated iTunes folders under one artist rather than under VA or
Various Artists.
So, if you thought of it as stating True or False to having the following criterion be equal to be considered duplicate: Title, Artist, Album Artist, Album, & Time. This is similar to what you did with the disc number (smart tweak).
Artist=False Artist must match for songs to be duplicates (Here the artist wouldn't have to match)
Album Artist=False Album Artist must match for songs to be duplicates (Here the artist wouldn't have to match)
Album=True Album must match for songs to be duplicates (Here the Album would have to match)
Title=True Title must be equal for songs to be duplicates (Here the Title would have to match)
Why Title!? Some songs are mis-named: EX: Rollings Stones' Satisfaction AKA I Can't Get No Satisfaction AKA (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction. This would catch songs that are not consistently named.
I assume the lines of the script would be similar for all of the above factors (but what do I know?) Then you could add the options for time (within how many seconds, with 0 being exactly the same), or match a specific length of title (first X characters of title, with 0 being the whole title) for the two songs to be considered duplicates. I assume the later two are more difficult but could be conceptualized as:
Time=2 Time must be within X seconds (+/-) of another song to be considered a duplicate.
Title=True Title must be equal for songs to be considered duplicates
If true, Length=0 Title must match the first X of title, if 0 the whole title must match
There are other variables you could add, like Track, but I cannot see how that would be useful.” Feb 2, 2022 8:52 AM in response to esumsea
