Manage a collection of MIDI files, why and how?
Own thousands of MIDI files, why not? But from a certain number, manual sorting is not enough anymore.
How to make sure of their uniqueness? How to be sure that we do not already have those we add?
Karaboss offers powerful and effective dual detection functions to support you in this daunting task.
Owning a large number of files, basically, is no use if we do not do anything with them.
Except maybe if you have a collector’s soul. But why on earth collect MIDI files when you can collect cheese boxes?
Well, you must have the time to listen to them, or worse, learn to play them if you are a musician, or to sing them if you are a singer.
But be aware that, anyway, even if you have astronomical quantities, you will never have the one you are asked, or you dream to add to your repertoire.
And then often, when you have the right file, it is double, triple, quadruple etc …
Among these duplicates, some have excellent sound quality, but sometimes downright disastrous.
That’s it, for this preamble. The idea is not to know what to do with these 30,000 files, bequeathed by your grandfather, but to make them unique.
Besides having duplicates of the same title can have several meanings.
Different orchestrations of the same piece
In this case, having several versions of the same song is of obvious interest.
Acoustic version, electric version, live version etc …
If the quality is at the rendezvous and if you are a musician, or fan of the artist, it may be interesting to keep them.
The same orchestration, but of very different qualities
In this case it will be necessary to keep the best version.
The only way to do this is to listen to each piece and ruthlessly eliminate those that you think are bad.
It’s hard to throw, I know, it’s too definitive.
Who does not have the versions (1), (2), (3) or even (4) of the same piece?
This is unfortunately sometimes due to the fact that no version really stands out, and in this case why throw this or that version?
And finally the real doubles
They are carpet insidiously in the depths of your directory trees. But how to identify them with certainty?
This is where the utilities offered by Karaboss become interesting!
To do this, Karaboss offers two Search modules:
- Look for duplicates within your library or any other tree.
- Look for duplicates in relation to your library.
In this case, compares the files you want to add to your library to eliminate the ones you already have.
Keep reassured, Karaboss does not search for duplicates based on unsafe criteria such as file name or file size.
To detect duplicates, the software will create an index of all your files, each time calculating the MD5 checksum of the file. If two checksums MD5 are identical, it means that both files have identical content, without necessarily having the same name or the same size.
In addition, when duplicates are detected, no deletion is made.
At the end of the search process, you have the choice to either move the duplicate files to a subdirectory named “doubles”, or touch nothing, but simply display a list of duplicates allowing you to manually process each file.
In the case of moving duplicates to a subdirectory, it is the file with the shortest name that is moved (we don’t want to destroy all your renaming work!)
Choosing to move duplicates to a subdirectory is especially useful when you want to import new files into your library. This automatically deletes the files you already have from your import directory.
How to proceed ?
You access the file management utilities from the Karaboss Explorer.
Menu “Tools” > “Manage my files“