Hi there.

Had my Empeg/Rio for a few months now - I had a sony 10 disc CD changer previously that got less and less reliable, so decided I needed a new one, but on a complete whim I thought I'd search the net first to see if there was anything more sophisticated available.

Came across a few MP3 players - including the Phatnoise - which kind of emulated CD changers. A bit more searching and I came across the Empeg/Rio. Read all about it - very impressive, but then read it was discontinued. Bit more searching and I find them for sale very cheaply in the US (can't remember the site, but rest assured there's none left now).

Got it imported to the UK with a set of filters for about £280 - less than I was planning to spend on a new CD changer!

Since then I've played around with it a lot - installed hijack, custom visuals, used it to host web pages, upgraded the kernel, installed a second drive etc. It's now got a 10Gb + 30Gb drive, which is nearly full after uploading my whole CD collection (about 600 CD's).

Which leads me (eventually) to my question... A lot of the CD's I've uploaded are compilations, so there's an enormous amount of overlap and duplicated tracks across the collection. For some reason emplode is very bad at reporting duplicate tracks whilst uploading so I now face the grim task of manually removing the duplicate tracks.

I'm not too fussed about getting the exact version of a given track on the Empeg - i.e. in most cases I don't mind if the track is a single version, album version, radio edit or whatever. I'd rather just have a single copy of each track and setup a playlist to recreate a given album.

So what I'm after is an easy way to sort through 5000 tracks and identify those that match by artist & title - I can then decide which version to keep & rig up playlists to 'patch' the missing track into the correct position on each album.

I've tried exporting the entire playlist in CSV format, then sorting by Artist and Title using Excel. This gives me a list where I can identify duplicates, but I still need to manually scan through the entire 5000 entries. And I don't want to repeat the exercise next time I upload a batch of new CD's.

I thought that this would be just the type of functionality that jEmplode would offer, but it seems pretty much like Emplode in this respect. I've searched the FAQ and Forum and can't find any other mention of people with the same problem though...

Surely there must be other people who have this problem with their Emplode? And surely there must be someone who can offer a quick solution?

I'm contemplating writing a simple program to open the CSV file, sort it into Artist & Title order, then display a list of all matches where the count > 1. But then again, if somebody else has done this, or if it would be better as a jEmplode feature then I won't bother.

Any ideas people have would be very much appreciated...

Cheers,

Andrew.

The only thing I can think of is to use the "All Tracks" view in emplode and sort by song title. Scroll through and see if the same song gets repeated twice.

FAQ entries on this topic are here, but they don't cover your specific situation of having the same song from two different source albums. (Well, technically, it's not the same song, just very very very similar.)

Can anyone think of a way to use the Search feature to find only pairs of songs with the same title?

Do you really have that many duplicate songs just from compilation albums?

And something else to think about: Based on your description, this problem of having duplicate songs must also exist on your PC's hard disk, right? You're asking the empeg to solve a problem that already exists in your original collection.

Thanks for replying!

I've tried scrolling through the all tracks view, and although it's easy to spot duplicates, it's also a pretty dull way to spend a couple of hours. Being a technical sort of chap, I'd like to just click a few buttons and get a list of all the duplicates automatically!

I suppose there's not really that many duplicates on there, but I've also uploaded a lot of stuff from the net, and lots of different 'best of' albums. My gut feel is that there's probably a few hundred duplicate tracks on there at least. Dance music is probably the worst offender - I usually buy dance compilation CD's rather than albums by one artist so I end up with quite a lot of overlap.

I'm probably just being a bit anal in terms of the amount of disk space it would save, but I'd like to only see a track listed once when I use the remote to search.

And sadly I don't have a mirror of my Mp3 files on my PC. Most of the conversion I've done on my PC at work as a sort of manual background task (took weeks to do, so better to get paid to do it!) which doesn't have 40Gb spare - so I've uploaded the tracks in batches, then deleted the Mp3's from the hard disk to make room for the next batch. I guess the network guys might get a bit upset if I started filling the public fileservers with my mp3 collection too!

My biggest concern is having to do the manual checking more than once ever in my life - I'd rather write a program to check through the exported playlist instead. It just strikes me that this would be a feature that might be useful to others as well, and would be much easier to write within jEmplode as the playlist is already resident in memory...

I'm probably just being a bit anal in terms of the amount of disk space it would save, but I'd like to only see a track listed once when I use the remote to search.

No, you're not being too picky about it. I'd be the same way if I knew there were duplicates on my player.

It's just that if I was going to be that anal about it, I would have done the duplicate-removal before the stuff even got sent to the player in the first place.

I'd rather write a program to check through the exported playlist instead.

Anyone good with programming Excel macros? We could make a really cool dupe-checking macro and put it up on the Riocar.org site for everyone to use.

Better yet, we could do this: We could create an Excel spreadsheet that prompts for the name of the CSV file and imports it. Then it presents you with a menu of all sorts of useful functions: Dupe checking, stats on the songs, locating parent playlists, that sort of thing. We could keep expanding it to add new functions.

Then again, just thinking about it, this could be better implemented as additional features in Jemplode. It's open source, who wants to take a stab at it?

You don't need to scan through the Excel file. Sort everything by track name and then create a function in a new column to look for duplicates. The function could be something as simple as =IF(A2=A1,"duplicate","")

All you have to do then is scroll down (or search) for the word "duplicate" in the new collumn.

Quicker than manually looking for the duplicate rows in Excel, highlight the new column, copy it to the clipboard and then without changing the activated cells do edit > paste special > values to fix it all as text. Sort again by that column and all your duplicates will be together. Steve.