iCloud duplicate detection?

[spidertaker23]

Ok I have a library of about 30ish gb and my wife has a library of 30ish gb. We share one apple ID for iTunes Music. Probably half of our libraries is overlap. I was thinking about buying iTunes Match and then have it scan both our libraries. How good do you think the duplicate detection is? Would I end up with a crap ton of duplicates? I figured this would end up as a good way for us to combine our libraries into one library and have us both be able to access all of our music on our iPhone's.

I have already went through and completely re-organized and re-tagged all my music. I would obviously do the same to hers before even attempting this.

What do you guys think good or bad idea?

 

[jamesarm97]

I think it detects the duplicates, but still shows them. I see some songs listed twice, but one is a lighter color and can't be selected. I am in the process of redoing my library to get rid of duplicates.

 

[spidertaker23]

I was hoping it would detect duplicates in iTunes Match already and not match or upload them. Cuz honestly if I had to try to combine our libraries by hand first I probably won't ever do it lol.

 

[sulliweb]

Nope, it'll do what you want... Example:

Computer 1: I had 5 songs off a CD.

Computer 2: None of the songs were downloaded, just showed the iCloud listings. I went ahead and imported the entire CD today on it as a test.

On computer 2, it imported the CD, and where there were iCloud listings before, those just vanished because it matched the CD, so in your case, as it matches songs that are on the other computer, it will just ignore them. The only thing that will happen, is that you'll both have your complete library showing on both computers, vs. the partial library you have now....

Not sure if there's a way to hide without deleting at this point...

I hope that helps!

 

[spidertaker23]

Ok that's good to know. I wonder if it is so successful if the songs that are matching (songs that would be duplicates) are not coming from the same source. Meaning they weren't both ripped from the same cd. I guess this goes back how does iTunes Match match songs? Does it use audio fingerprinting? ID3 tags?

I ask these questions because I use tuneup to organize my music and I know that it has incorrectly identified my songs before. Like say you have a song and/or album that is a new band covering an old song. Sometimes even tuneup (which uses audio finger printing with gracenote) even gets this wrong. In the case of iTunes match this could be even more of a problem, because with TuneUp you can you tell it not to change the info and that it's match is wrong. With iTunes Match you just have to accept whatever it matches right? What if the match is wrong?

 

[flynz4]

I have a slightly different question about duplicates. My library is matching now... and I am wondering how duplicates will work.

For some artists, I have a number of albums... but also a "greatest hits" album that has some identical cuts from the original albums. Will those show up as duplicates? Will the songs be listed in both the original album, and also the greatest hits album?

Since I like listening to albums (vs individual songs)... I want all the albums to remain with the full compliment of songs.

/Jim

 

[Andrew*Debbie]

How good do you think the duplicate detection is?

Fair. It will detect duplicates but often won't do the right thing.

Would I end up with a crap ton of duplicates?

It depends on the source. If most of your duplicates are 256kbps iTunes store purchases, match will work well.

If you have a lossless CD rip and your wife has the identical albums as an iTunes store purchase it won't work well. If you have an old 128kbs iTunes purchase and your wife has the same thing as a 256kbps iTunes plus, you will probably have to look at each track and the duplicate by hand.


Match will take time too. Depends on your connection speed, how much of your music is available on iTunes and how busy Apple's servers are when you do that matching. Only one computer can match at a time. I'd allow a few days for the initial match to complete.


I matched my home computer with my office machine. Same iTunes account. Two days later and I'm still matching up the two machines. Part of the bottleneck is my not very fast home ADSL connection. The other bottle neck appears to be on Apple's servers. Out of 2K tracks I ended up with about 200 duplicates.

Many of these were for music I had upgraded to DRM free when it came available. Others were for songs I purchased directly from the Band's website -- often in Apple Lossless or FLAC recoded to lossless.

As often as not iTunes picked the wrong track to 'keep'.

Fixable by hand but annoying.