Identify differences between MP3 files
- by Thingomy
I have 2 old similar directory trees with MP3 files in them. I am happily using tools like diff and Rsync to identify and merge the files that are only present on one side, or are identical, I'm left with a bunch of files that are bitwise different.
On running diff over a pair actually different files, (with -a tag to force text analysis) it produces incomprehensible gibberish. I have listened to files from both sides, and they both seem to play fine (but at nearly 10 minutes per song, when listening to them twice each, I haven't done many)
I suspect the differences are due to some player in the past "enhancing" my collection by messing about with ID3 tags, but I can't be certain. Even if I identify differences in ID3 tags, I would like to confirm that no cosmic ray or file copy error issues have damaged any of the files.
One method that occurs to be is finding the byte locations of the differences, and ignoring all changes in the first ~10kb of each file, but I don't know how to do this.
I have on the order of a hundred or so files that differ across the directory tree.
I found How to compare mp3, flac audio data in a file, ignoring header data (ID3 tag) etc.? -- but I can't run alldup due to being Linux only, and from the sounds of it, it would only partially solve my issues anyway.
