ok so i had this music collection of all kinda tracks.. comprising of about 4500 songs.. i was like this initially Friends harddisk ~add it cousins pendrive ~add it Saali's Phone ~add it chachas harddisk~add it as well .. and so on and so forth.. so my 200 fav songs collection blew up to 4500 songs .. mostly random in nature.. some i havent ever heard of then i decided enough was enough.. so i made a separate folder of new songs that i was liking .. and entirely sat on the old collection out of laziness.. until one day during one of those trips to raichak i realised where were all the classics and how long could i continuously listen to this kind of head banging music.. also i had upgraded wifey to iPhone and she was hell bent on utilising those 16Gigs of space with soulful music.. just when i had decided that enough was enough the arrival bells of my angel rang and this was again put back to the sidelines for 4 mths .. finally last week i decided to set the record straight.. and this is the process i followed on my mac .. though most can went to File explorer folder of my music and set all the track with missing or no info to another folder ( tracks like track 1, title1 song 1 etc) after which i was left with 4200 songs then i added all the songs to iTunes and selected the display duplicates option (File>display duplicates) after deleting all the duplicates (only those with same names or tags) i got back to the classic way of organising music i decided on a way of tagging music.. a formula of sorts * trance/instrumental ** random/everythin else *** dance **** romance ***** Favz i started selecting songs that i like first by Artist , then by Genre, then by Name and rating them 5 stars .. then i followed it up by tracks i dance to to 3 stars and some okayish romantic tracks to 4 stars .. then i sorted by genre and tagged all the trance/ house/ instrumental to 3 stars after which the number came down to 2900 tracks will update the post when i reach my goal of under 2k tracks
There a softwares that will do that for you .. First I would suggest doing a *.mp3 search on your Music directory. Use Detail view and then sort by file-size. see which consecutive files have the same size, delete one and keep the other. You can do the same with file name as well. If you have added IDv3 tags then Search *.mp3 , use detail view, select the artist and bitrate columns, sort by Artist and then pick and delete the ones with the lower bitrate.