Find Duplicates

You can find the duplicate scanner in the top menu bar under Utility

With Find Duplicates you can scan all your tracks in your library and automatically compare them based on the audio signature or tags. This way truly identical audio duplicates are found. This even works with different file types. If you have an MP3 and a WAV with the same audio, Lexicon will match them and lets you choose which one you want to keep.

Only tracks that are 25 minutes or less in duration are scanned by audio signature. Tracks with a longer duration are skipped. Tracks shorter than 15 seconds are also skipped by the scanner.

The audio signatures are stored in your library. The first scan may take longer but subsequent scans will be much faster.

Lexicon also checks your tracks for duplicate artist/title combinations. These results will not have an exact audio signature match but the artist/title check is pretty strict so they are almost always the same track. To recognise these artist/title combinations, your tags need to be clean. Consider using Smart Fixes to make sure your titles are as clean as possible.

You can stop the scan at any time and you will be able to continue with the results that were found up to that point. If your scan takes a very long time, it might be wise to do this in a few steps.

Explained

After the scan, which can take quite some time, you will be presented with a list of duplicates. A "duplicate" consists of two or more tracks. Lexicon will have intelligently preselected tracks based on bitrate, cues and more.

You can accept these results as they are, but it would be wise to go through the results and see if everything looks good. If you have many duplicates, it can really speed things up to use the Prefer option, see below.

Choosing which track to keep

Each duplicate shows its tracks with the track to keep selected. To keep a different track, click that track in the list. If the duplicate is locked, click its Locked label first to unlock it.

Tracks whose file is missing are never chosen as the track to keep.

Audio Match and Tag Match

Duplicates found by audio signature are exact audio matches. Duplicates found by artist and title are Tag Matches: they are very likely the same track, but not guaranteed.

When a scan finds more than 100 duplicates, Lexicon locks all Tag Match duplicates for safety. Locked duplicates are left alone. Unlock them one by one by clicking Locked, or use Unlock all, and review them in batches.

When you are done going through the results, press the Review button to see which tracks are going to get archived. Do one last check to see if that all looks good and archive them.

Your playlists are now updated so the archived tracks are no longer in them. The playlists are still correct as the bad tracks have been replaced by the good tracks from the duplicates. You will find the bad tracks in the Archive where you can clean them up (delete or move) them at any time.

Manual Merge

If you already have the tracks next to each other or they differ too much to be considered duplicates, you can manually merge them. Do this by selecting them ➡ right click ➡ Send to ➡ Duplicate merge.

This skips the scan and opens the Manual duplicate merge window with only these tracks. Click the track you want to keep and press Merge & Archive. The other tracks are archived and your playlists are updated to use the kept track.

You can also use this window to only copy tags and cues from one track to the others without archiving anything, see Copy these tags & cues below.

Scan Settings

Scan type

Full library scan: This will scan your entire library and show all results, this can take a long time.

Selected playlist(s) scan: This will only scan the files in the selected playlist(s) and only show results from those playlists. This includes archived tracks if they are in those playlists.

Full library scan (playlists filtered): This will scan your entire library but only show results of which there is a track in any of your selected playlists. This includes archived tracks if they are in those playlists.

Tag search tolerance

You can reduce the duplicate scanner tolerance so it will find more results. The tolerance option only applies to the artist & title tag comparison. Audio fingerprinting is not affected by this setting.

The default tolerance is None which is the strictest/safest and has no chance for false positives.

The following tolerance options are available: None: Very strict. Artist and title must be a perfect match other than casing and special characters.

Low: Strict. Artist and title must be a near perfect match. Typos and minor differences can be seen as duplicates.

Medium: Less strict. Common title words such as "extended", "bootleg" are ignored. Many more common words are also ignored.

High: Not strict. Common title words are ignored and typo's and minor differences can be seen as duplicates. This is likely to result in some false positives.

Ignore Parentheses: Dangerous option! This will ignore anything in (parentheses) in your track titles so it is guaranteed to give you false positives. Use this if you want to go through your remixes and such. Highly advised to Lock All duplicates and only unlock what you are sure you want changed.

It's best to start with no tolerance and work your way up in multiple scans. On the High tolerance, be sure to check each result carefully.

Ignore folders

This setting allows you to choose folders on your hard drive that the duplicate scanner will ignore. Any track in any ignore folder or any of its subfolders will not be included in the scan.

Preselection

Lexicon intelligently pre-selects the track to keep in the result screen. It prefers a 320 kbps MP3 if that track has the most cue points, and otherwise the track with the highest bitrate. Tracks with a missing file are never pre-selected.

If it is an exact audio match and another track has more cues than the track to keep, the track to keep gets the tags and cues of that other track. For Tag Match duplicates this is not done automatically, because the cue points may not line up.

Play Count

Lexicon will combine the play counts of all the duplicate tracks and use that combined value as the play count for your track to keep.

MP4 (video) files

MP4 files that contain video are ignored in the duplicate scan. MP4 files that only contain audio are treated as normal audio files.

Re-importing in your DJ app

After you've used the scanner, your DJ app will still contain links to old files that no longer exist. A Full Sync to your DJ app solves this because a Full Sync also removes the old tracks.

All DJ apps

Make sure you do a Full Sync otherwise tracks deleted from your library are not removed from your DJ app database.

Rekordbox 5 (XML) only

These extra steps are only required if you use the Rekordbox XML sync method. If you use the Rekordbox 6/7 method, you should not do these steps.

Your playlists will not see the new paths until you delete and re-import the playlist. What you need to do is right click Playlists in the left menu in Rekordbox and select Delete all. This will remove all your playlists. You can then re-import your de-duplicated playlists by right clicking Playlists in the XML tab of Rekordbox and selecting Import playlist. All your playlists will be back and have now been updated with the correct paths to your tracks.

You can also delete your entire library before importing everything, then all old files will be gone too. However, you will need to re-analyze all your files so the former method is better.

Results

These options are available when scanning for duplicates or when choosing results.

You can right click tracks to play them or open the folder they are in.

Use these tags & cues

You can tell Lexicon to keep one file but use the cue points and tags of another file. Right click the track that has the tags and cues you want and choose Use these tags & cues. The selected track is still the one that is kept, the others are archived.

If the match was based on an artist/title combination (so not an exact audio signature match), you can still merge tags & cues but the cue points may not be in the exact right place. This is because the tracks may not be the exact same duration (sometimes silence is added to the start of audio files) and this can offset the cue point positions.

Copy these tags & cues

You can also copy all tags and cues from one track to the other tracks of a duplicate without archiving anything. Right click the track with the tags and cues you want and choose Copy these tags & cues. The duplicate now shows Copy only: both files stay in your library and get the same tags and cues.

This is especially useful if you have multiple versions (e.g. MP3 and FLAC) of the same file and you want the same cues on all versions.

Tracks that have duplicates only in the same folder and without the same amount of cues are sorted to the top to make this process easier.

Ignore

If a duplicate contains a track that doesn't belong there, right click it and choose Ignore. The track is left out of that duplicate and Lexicon remembers this by file location, so it is also left out of future scans. Choose Ignore again to undo it.

A duplicate with only two tracks can't have a track ignored. Lock that duplicate instead.

Lock/unlock all

This locks and unlocks all duplicates. Locked duplicates cannot be changed and will not be modified in any way. No tracks part of a set of duplicates will get archived when locked.

Prefer...

With the Prefer... button below the scan results, you can auto-select duplicates that meet certain criteria. This is very useful when you have many duplicates that you want to get rid of in bulk.

A quick way to prefer a folder is to right click a track in that folder and choose Set as preferred folder.

Locked duplicates are skipped unless you enable Override locked. Be careful with this.

Inside (sub)folder

With this option, Lexicon will automatically select any track that occurs inside the chosen folder or any of its subfolders.

When you set a preferred path, Lexicon will give priority to original tracks, this means tracks that don't end with things like "Copy" or "(1)".

Example: you could tell Lexicon that you prefer paths that start with D:/audio which will auto select all duplicate results that start with that.

Highest bitrate

This will select the track from duplicates that has the highest bitrate.

Most cue points

This will select the track from duplicates that has the most cue points.

Most plays

This will select the track from duplicates that has the highest play count.

Title contains word

This will select the track where the title contains a certain word.

Extra 1 contains word

This will select the track where the Extra 1 field contains a certain word.

Extra 1 does not contain word

This will select the track where the Extra 1 field does not contain a certain word.

Streaming track

This will select the track that is a streaming track such as Beatport LINK, etc.

Local track

This will select the track that is a local (non-streaming) track.

Use highest tags & cues

With this option enabled, Lexicon will copy the tags and cue points from a track even if that track is not the preferred track. This can only happen when duplicates are exact audio matches. This allows you to keep tracks in a preferred folder even if that track did not have your cue points. They will be copied and the track in your preferred location will now also have the tags and cues of the archived track.

See Tag & cue copying above for more information.

Save unlocked to playlist

This option allows you to save all unlocked tracks that are found to a new playlist. This is useful if you want to manually check every duplicate. For example, if you modified the waveform with third party software and you want to make sure you know which is the nicer one.