"fdmf" is a flexible software solution that combines Perl and C programming languages. With its portable features, this software can easily identify and group pairs of music files that are suspected to contain the same musical content within a large collection.
If you are interested in testing out the software, the developer welcomes your feedback. You can send an email to them, sharing your experience with the FDmf software. Providing bug reports could help them to make the software better. Furthermore, if you have a large set of files to test it on, this would help to optimize the software performance.
The optimal way to lend files to the FDmf software development team is to provide a CD or DVD of MP3 or OGG files. You can send this via postal mail, and the media will be mailed back to you, along with some extra disks of music that you can use for your testing purposes.
The usage of FDmf is simple. You can run it using the command fdmf < music_dir > vector_pairs. For example, ./fdmf /home/bob/music/ ./vector_pairs. The vector_pairs will print on stdout a list of pairs of files that may contain the same music.
However, please keep in mind that the first time you run this program, it will do a lot of processing. It takes about 10 minutes to process a music_dir containing 140 mp3 files on an Apple G4. The software will attempt to cache the result so that subsequent runs will be faster. You can interrupt it, and your progress will not be lost.
On another note, on the current development box, an IBM T20, mplayer is the fastest mp3 decoder. However, mpg123 is also quite fast, much faster than mpg321. Some Linux distros come with mpg123, which is a symbolic link to mpg321 since mpg123 is not under GPL. In conclusion, you can use any program for decoding if it can take the name of a music file as a command-line argument and write the raw decoded 44100/stereo/16-bit stream on stdout. You may want to run some tests to see which decoder works best for your system.
Version 0.0.9r: N/A