• About Sloud Music Content Inspector
• What the MCI program does
• Scanning Music Files
• Selecting folders and Start Scanning
• Scan Report
• Browsing the Results of Scanning
• Finding Duplicates of Sound Records
• Browsing and Editing Duplicates
• Browsing Music Files
• Filtering Results
• Shortcut menu
• Music Playback
• Editing File Information
• Deleting or Moving Files
• Open Containing Folder
• Program Settings
• System Requirements
• Installing the MCI program

Notes on using the MCI 1.0 beta version

  

Getting Started

What the program does

If you are a music fan and a proud owner of a large MP3 collection, this application is for you. It will help you order and sort your music files. The same composition may occur in your collection multiple times in different files, with different formats and quality of recording. The tags could be missing or inconsistent. Previously the only way to find such duplicates was to listen to the records. Not anymore. Music Content Inspector (MCI) will find duplicates even if the files are different.

MCI scans selected directories and reads the musical content of the files. That's right! It's not just doing it the old fashioned way by reading the tags and file names or calculating hashes. It reads the content and extracts salient features of the recordings (NOT comparing files byte by byte). The files don't have to be identical. If they contain the same record they will be identified as duplicates even if the files are different due to different compression, different quality, or even presence of some noise. This feature is unique for the applications of this class.

In addition to finding duplicates MCI has a built-in tag editor and a file manager. MCI also compiles a full report on quality of the files in your music collection with respect to quality of the file formats and completeness of metadata in tags.

Scanning Music Files

Selecting folders and Start Scanning

Open the 'Scan' tab in the program window. Choose the disks and folders containing music files you want to examine by left clicking in the check-boxes.

Click the 'Start scan' button and wait for the scan to run through. The scanning time depends on the number of selected files, program settings, and performance of your computer.

Scan Report

You can observe the scanning progress in the Summary window. This window displays general information on selected files. The Audio Files Quality column shows the quality of the scanned files. It is defined by the audio encoder parameters and by the quality of the primary audio signal.

Browsing the Results of Scanning

When the scan is finished you can browse its results by clicking the 'Show' button or the 'Browse' tab.

Finding Duplicates of Sound Records

When the scan is finished you can run the procedure of duplicates search over the scanned files. In order to do this, click the 'Check duplicates' button and wait for the search completion. The number of the duplicate groups found will be displayed in the bottom-left corner of the Summary window.

Browsing and Editing Duplicates

Click the 'Show' button or the 'Duplicates' tab to browse results of a duplicates search. All found music duplicates are grouped together and presented as a list. You can compare duplicates in a given group, play back, edit tags, delete or move files by right clicking on the file record in the list.

Browsing Music Files

Open the 'Browse' tab. You can see the list of examined files. The list can be sorted by any column. You can browse file information and edit file's tags by right clicking on the file record. You can also play back, delete or move any file from the list.

Filtering Results

If the list of files is very large, it's convenient to use the Filter tool. The Filter allows to display a subset of the full list selecting files by a rule. The tool is displayed in the bottom-left corner of the window. The file list can be sorted by any one of the following fields:

• filename (including a full path name)
• tag 'title'
• tag 'artist'
• tag 'album'
• tag 'genre'
• tag 'year'
• tag 'composer'
• codec
• bitrate
• quality

Shortcut menu

Right-click any row in your list of search results and the shortcut menu will appear. The menu options are the following:

• Play
• Edit tags
• Delete
• Delete all except selected
• Copy tags
• Paste tags
• Move to folder
• Open containing folder

Music Playback

The option 'Play' allows you to listen to the music through the system's default media player.

Editing File Information

Pick 'Edit tags' in the shortcut menu. The following file information can be edited in pop-up window:

• tag 'title'
• tag 'artist'
• tag 'album'
• tag 'genre'
• tag 'year'
• tag 'composer'(not available for OGG files)
• tag 'track'

Deleting or Moving Files

These menu options permit to physically delete or move music files. Information on such files will be automatically updated in the MCI database.

Open containing folder

That option opens Windows Explorer and displays the contents of the folder with the file you selected.

Settings

When the option 'Scan entire audiofile' is selected MCI scans audio files from the beginning to the end. Otherwise the program will scan only the first 45 seconds of the record. It will be useful for finding duplicates in audio files with classical music (or DJ’s mixes) which contain several parts in one file. Note: in this case the scanning time will increase.

The 'Scan files' options permit to select formats of audio files to be scanned.

System Requirements

• Pentium PIII processor (or higher)
• RAM 512 MB
• 50 MB free space on HDD
• Microsoft Windows XP
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

NOTE: The MCI application requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. You can download it for free from Microsoft Web site.
Installation of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 has to be done prior to installing MCI.

Microsoft, Windows XP, .NET Framework are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Pentium is registered trademark of Intel Corporation.

Installing the MCI program

1. Download or copy mci_setup.exe file on hard disk.
2. Click the mci_setup.exe file.
3. Follow the Setup Instruction on the screen.