Preferences - Setting dupeGuru preferences

Scan Type: This option determines what aspect of the files will be compared in the duplicate scan. The nature of the duplicate scan varies greatly depending on what you select for this option.

• Filename: Every song will have its filename split into words, and then every word will be compared to compute a matching percentage. If this percentage is higher or equal to the Filter Hardness (see below for more details), dupeGuru will consider the 2 songs duplicates.
• Filename - Fields: Like Filename, except that once filename have been split into words, these words are then grouped into fields. The field separator is " - ". The final matching percentage will be the lowest matching percentage among the fields. Thus, "An Artist - The Title" and "An Artist - Other Title" would have a matching percentage of 50 (With a Filename scan, it would be 75).
• Filename - Fields (No Order): Like Filename - Fields, except that field order doesn't matter. For example, "An Artist - The Title" and "The Title - An Artist" would have a matching percentage of 100 instead of 0.
• Tag: This method reads the tag (metadata) of every song and compare their fields. This method, like the Filename - Fields, considers the lowest matching field as its final matching percentage.
  Content: This scan method use the actual content of the songs to determine which are duplicates. For 2 songs to match with this method, they must have the exact same content.
• Audio Content: Same as content, but only the audio content is compared (without metadata).

Filter Hardness: If you chose a filename or tag based scan type, this option determines how similar two filenames/tags must be for dupeGuru to consider them duplicates. If the filter hardness is, for example 80, it means that 80% of the words of two filenames must match. To determine the matching percentage, dupeGuru first counts the total number of words in both filenames, then count the number of words matching (every word matching count as 2), and then divide the number of words matching by the total number of words. If the result is higher or equal to the filter hardness, we have a duplicate match. For example, "a b c d" and "c d e" have a matching percentage of 57 (4 words matching, 7 total words).

Word weighting: If you chose a filename or tag based scan type, this option slightly changes how matching percentage is calculated. With word weighting, instead of having a value of 1 in the duplicate count and total word count, every word have a value equal to the number of characters they have. With word weighting, "ab cde fghi" and "ab cde fghij" would have a matching percentage of 53% (19 total characters, 10 characters matching (4 for "ab" and 6 for "cde")).

Match similar words: If you turn this option on, similar words will be counted as matches. For example "The White Stripes" and "The White Stripe" would have a match % of 100 instead of 66 with that option turned on. Warning: Use this option with caution. It is likely that you will get a lot of false positives in your results when turning it on. However, it will help you to find duplicates that you wouldn't have found otherwise. The scan process also is significantly slower with this option turned on.

Can mix file kind: If you check this box, duplicate groups are allowed to have files with different extensions. If you don't check it, well, they aren't!

Copy and Move: Determines how the Copy and Move operations (in the Action menu) will behave.

• Right in destination: All files will be sent directly in the selected destination, without trying to recreate the source path at all.
• Recreate relative path: The source file's path will be re-created in the destination directory up to the root selection in the Directories panel. For example, if you added "/Users/foobar/Music" to your Directories panel and you move "/Users/foobar/Music/Artist/Album/the_song.mp3" to the destination "/Users/foobar/MyDestination", the final destination for the file will be "/Users/foobar/MyDestination/Artist/Album" ("/Users/foobar/Music" has been trimmed from source's path in the final destination.).
• Recreate absolute path: The source file's path will be re-created in the destination directory in it's entirety. For example, if you move "/Users/foobar/Music/Artist/Album/the_song.mp3" to the destination "/Users/foobar/MyDestination", the final destination for the file will be "/Users/foobar/MyDestination/Users/foobar/Music/Artist/Album".

In all cases, dupeGuru nicely handles naming conflicts by prepending a number to the destination filename if the filename already exists in the destination.