Over To You: Best Way To De-Dupe A Collection?

Today’s Over To You comes from a mobile DJ, Dean, who says: “One question that I have is that I have been saving all my music for years and have crunched all my CDs to MP3. Now I have have a 2TB external drive full, with video and karaoke, too. I think I might have 25% duplicate songs. Can you think of the best way to remove any dupes and put them on another hard drive? (That way I could go back and get them, if needed).”

Digital DJ Tips says:

You need a much smaller collection anyway in my view, but I’d say make a backup of the whole thing first, then try TuneUp! or DupeAway, assuming you’re organising your music in iTunes. If not, look at Audio Dedupe, although as I’ve always used iTunes to organise my music, it’s a tool I haven’t personally tried. Not sure how this would work for karaoke or video.

To be honest, I am not experienced in such high-volume file management (for club DJs I recommend much, much smaller collections), so I’d love to ask our karaoke / video / mobile DJ readers what they do or what they’d do in this situation.

So, over to you! Have you ever had to do this? What tools do you think Dean should use, or avoid? Please share your thoughts and methods in the comments.