Giveaway of the Day Review - Audio Comparer

Today's software from Giveaway of the Day is Audio Comparer. The software's maker claims that it "listens to your audio files and compares them by their actual audio content, just like your own human ears do". From my tests, Audio Comparer found duplicates accurately.

Installation

No problems with the installation, just run the file provided - no additional steps required.

Ease of use

The program does one thing - helping you weed out duplicates in your music library. As such, choosing a folder and selecting the duplicates was a simple process. No help file was provided, though this wasn't a big issue to me.

I did click the "remove" button too quickly, before I saw the"Delete" button. Oops, should have looked more closely (The remove button clears/hides the selected files from view, while the delete button moves them to the recycle bin).

Features/ Performance

On my 3.06GHz Pentium 4 machine, the program processed about 30 files per minute, taking 18 minutes to go through my mix of 580 files. I left it running in the background, and there was no noticeable slow down in general system performance.

The program did well in recognising duplicates. No "false positives" were reported, and it picked up similar wma and mp3 versions of a music track. A rating is given to each set of music files based on how similar they sound.

While the program allows you to preview the songs, you have to click on individual files to see additional information. Displaying song titles, duration and bitrates in the main listing would make it easier to choose which version of a file to delete.

Those who listen to non-English tracks would like to know that Unicode filenames/tags are supported.

I experienced a crash while canceling a search, but was unable to reproduce the error again.

Summary

If you want to tidy up your music collection and are too lazy to go through them manually, this program can save you some time. Scanning for duplicates was a simple process, though the more important process of selecting the duplicates for deletion could be more user-friendly.

Get this if you don't have the habit of organising your music and want a easy-to-use program. For advanced users, get MediaMonkey.

Alternatives

The excellent MediaMonkey does more than just scan for duplicates. With tag organisation, auto-tagging of files and conversion tools, it is a one-stop media centre for managing your music. I didn't need the Gold version, the free version is sufficient.

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