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How To

How to: Remove duplicate MP3 files from your PC

Tom Clarke

Tom Clarke

  • Updated:

Deleting files in NoCloneIf you’re anything like me, you’ll have tens of thousands of MP3 files in various folders on multiple computers. Things can get pretty confusing and eventually, you end up with duplicate files showing up in your music player library. Now, it’s easy enough to remove duplicates from your library (in iTunes, just go to View -> Show Duplicates and then delete the ones you don’t want). But what about files which aren’t in your library? You know the ones, stuck, orphaned in some poorly labelled folder and taking up room on your disk.

Removing this sort of duplicate MP3 file can be more difficult without using an external application like NoClone, a program specifically designed to scan your hard disk and detect files which look identical. While it will work for all file types, it has a search profile for MP3 files built in to it, just to make things easier.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed NoClone, run it and in the left hand panel, select Duplicate MP3 from the Search Template drop-down menu. Browse to find the folder you want to search (or just search your entire disk) and then hit Search from the top menu bar. The search process can take a while, especially if you’re searching through a whole disk, but once it’s complete, NoClone shows you a list of files it considers to be duplicates. In our tests, we noticed a few false-positives, so caution is advised when you come to removing files… but at the same time, we really did discover duplicates we didn’t know about.

Tom Clarke

Tom Clarke

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