Merge

Over time a library collects the same artist, album or genre spelled in slightly different ways: Hip-Hop, Hip Hop and hiphop, or Un Verano Sin Tí and un verano sin ti. It also collects the same song stored twice, say a FLAC and an MP3 of the same recording. The Merge section finds these and lets you clean them up.

What you can do#

• Find artists, albums and genres that are the same but spelled differently, and merge them into one.
• Find duplicate tracks (the same recording in more than one file) and delete the copies you don’t want.
• Mark a group of duplicate tracks as intentional, so it stops showing up.

Open it from Merge in the sidebar (under Analyze).

Artists, albums and genres#

Click Scan on the Artists, Albums or Genres card. Soulsolid groups names that only differ by case, punctuation, accents or spacing. Albums are only grouped when their artist matches too, so two different albums that share a title aren’t mixed up.

For each group:

1. Pick the name to keep with the radio button. Soulsolid suggests the best-looking one (proper capitalization over ALL CAPS or all lowercase).
2. Untick any variant you don’t want merged.
3. Click Merge.

The merge runs as a job. Every track that used one of the other spellings is moved over to the name you kept, and its audio file tags are updated too, so the fix sticks even outside Soulsolid.

File paths aren’t updated after a merge. If your folder names include the artist, album or genre, run Reorganize afterwards to move the files to their new folders.

Duplicate tracks#

Duplicate tracks are found by AcoustID: two files with the same AcoustID are the same recording, even if they’re in different formats, bitrates or have slightly different tags. So run an AcoustID analysis first; tracks without an AcoustID can’t be matched.

Why not on import? When importing, Soulsolid compares the audio fingerprints directly, which already catches most duplicates without depending on an online service. But small differences (another encoding, bitrate, a slight edit, noise) can make two fingerprints of the same song differ slightly. AcoustID, a crowdsourced ID for each recording, catches those.

Click Scan on the Tracks card. For each group of duplicates you have two choices:

• Delete selected: tick the files you want to get rid of and click it. The ticked files are permanently deleted from disk and removed from the library. Playlists that contained a deleted copy now point to the copy you kept.
• Keep: leaves every file where it is and records the group as intentional duplicates, so it stops showing up in future scans. Nothing on disk changes.

Marked a group as Keep by mistake? Tick Include kept before scanning to see those groups again.

Related#

• Metadata / Tagging: run an AcoustID analysis before looking for duplicate tracks.
• Reorganize: move files to match their merged names.
• Importing: how duplicates are handled when music first arrives.
• Jobs: follow merge jobs.