DJ DupeScan

Duplicate Music, Video and Image

Finder/Remover

This program will scan your hard drives/folders for music, video, image, M3U playlists, ZIP and CDG files for duplicates based upon simple criteria, and allow you to delete, move or rename those files, so your DJ software will not import the duplicates into its library.

How to use it

Once you have downloaded the file to your computer, you simply double-click the downloaded file to run the install, which will guide you through the quick installation procedure. Once installed, you will have an icon on your desktop for DJ DupeScan. Double-click the icon, and you will see the main screen.

Once in the program, you can select the drive or folder on the left navigation pane that you are interested in. The program will automatically search any subfolders under whatever is selected. So for example, if you highlight the C drive, the entire drive will be searched for matching files.

Click Start File Scan, and the program will search the selected drive/folder, apply the option criteria, and when finished, will display the number of duplicates it found. You then click the Display Dupes button, and you will be taken to the following screen.

In our case, we have 145 duplicates on our C drive. You can click the column headers to sort the list by each field.

As you can see, we display the filename, file size, date created, date modified, and full path name to the files (there is also an index field hidden at the end, which is only used internally by the program. You select what files you want to operate on, by clicking the checkmark to the left of the filename. Standard Windows key combos apply (shift+click, ctrl+click).

What the Button Controls do

Select All: Self-explanatory, all the files in the list will get checked.

Select None: Self-explanatory, all the files in the list will get unchecked.

Rename: This will rename the files in place, meaning they won't be moved anywhere, but will have a .dup extension added onto the end of the files. This is handy if you're not sure, and may want to bring that file back at some point, in the folder it was originally in. You can always browse to a folder in Window's Explorer, and sort by type to find the dupes.

Move: This will prompt you for a folder, and move the selected files to that folder. This makes it easy to offload those files to an external drive, flash drive, etc.

Delete: This comes with an Are You Sure prompt. This will hard delete the files, meaning they will not go to the Recycle Bin, they will be permanently deleted from the drive.

Back: This is only used when you double-click a file in the list, which will list all occurrences of that file -- see below.

Double-click a file: This will show you all occurrences of the file in question. The reason for this is simple  -- the program has no idea which file you consider to be the original. They get listed in order as we find them, so the program considers the first one it finds as the original, and the rest dupes. Check this example below:

Here we show 4 entries for the particular song. The first two entries, we purposely placed into test folders for this exercise, so we know we want to get rid of those. On our computer, we have one main folder for MP3's, which is called C:\MP3, but we also have a C:\Nook Music folder, to synchronize certain songs to the Nook Reader (which plays music too). I want to keep both of these, so I would just check off the top two entries, click the Delete button, and viola, the top two are gone.

Now we can click the Back button, to go back to the full, updated listing of dupes.

Context Menu: If you right-click on an item in the list, you will see the following menu:

There are two options, Play in Default Player, and Properties.

Play in Default Player: Windows will use its file associations to pick the correct program to "play" the file. In our case, Windows Media Player would open to play this MP3 file. If it was a video file, it would also open in WMP on our computer. So it all depends on what application is the default player on your system, for the type of file you are attempting to "play".

Properties: This will open the standard Windows file properties to the Details page, like this, so you can view detailed information about the file, if you are unsure about which to get rid of:

Program Settings

SCAN OPTIONS:

The file attributes section has 4 options (3 actually, since we require at least the filename, so you can't uncheck that). The default you will see, is to have the size checked as well, although you can uncheck that if you like. We've found through testing, that if the filename and size match, you can pretty much rest assured it is the same file, just a copy in another location. The Creation Date and Modified Date can be used to fine tune for certain tasks, but they have some caveats (see NOTE below)...

NOTE: Windows has an interesting way of dealing with these dates, and often you will see the modified date, as earlier than the creation date. The reason for that, is because when you copy a file in Windows, it leaves the modified date unchanged, but sets the creation date to the date and time you copied the file. I assume they have some great reason for that, but I am not privy to it... :)

ADDITIONAL OPTIONS:

Ignore Windows Folders: This will ignore any matching items in C:\Windows, and its subfolders. This is on by default, as there are hundreds of sound bites, images, videos, etc. in those folders, and they have nothing to do with your music. It will also ignore entries in Program Files (and Program Files (x86) on 64 bit OS's).

Ignore files under 1 MB: Most music and video files are well over this size, so unless you are looking for small sound bites or samples, you should leave this on, and it will ignore all the little files.

File types to Scan for:

We've allowed for most of the common file types that a DJ will use. This is made mutually exclusive, so you can only scan for certain types at one time, otherwise it gets quite confusing looking at the results. Here is a listing of what each type will currently search for:

Audio: MP3, WAV, WMA, M4A, OGG, FLAC, MP4, AAC, RA, AIF and APE.

Video: MPG, MOV, WMV, VOB, DVX, RM, 3GP and 264

Image: JPG, GIF, BMP and PNG.

M3U: M3U

ZIP: ZIP

CDG: CDG

Register Software

This allows you to unlock the Rename, Move and Delete functions, once you have purchased the software. Once the software has been unlocked, you will no longer see that button.

Sorting

Click any of the headers, to sort on that particular field.

About

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Help

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