The Germans are Responsible Music Owners

Why is it that all the best music management tools seem to come out of Germany? Is it because their society craves order and organization? Probably. Regardless, via Ask MetaFilter, I just discovered a schnitzel of a utility from Deutschland: DoubleKiller. It does one thing, and does it well: help you identify and remove duplicate songs from your digital music collection. In about 10 minutes, I removed 325 MB worth of copies from my hard drive. Plus, DoubleKiller comes as a single, ready to use executable–no install necessary.

For years, I’ve used another German music management product called Dr. Tag. At the time, I evaluated several tagging apps and this one seemed the easiest to use. Plus, I dig the dancing fraulein on the box. Mit tanktop!

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t again credit the Yanks behind MusicBrainz, an ingenious and important project. It identifies songs against a database based on the music itself, not the metadata around it. This is very useful, as the metadata is often incomplete if you’ve obtained the file from a, er, unreliable source (or just been lazy about how you ripped the CD). Currently, there are acoustic fingerprints for 2,550,862 songs in their database. I also like their completely transparent finances.