How to compare mp3 programmatically

Question

I like to be able to compare mp3’s programmatically. The problem I don’t know by what. Header? Histogram? channels? Does anyone have experience with this subject?

Answer 1

I like to be able to compare mp3’s programmatically

I had the same question. I found that itunes had altered many of my Amazon MP3 downloads, changing the time/date stamps, the file sizes and therefore the MD5 signatures. My backups suddenly had many near duplicate files.

When I did a VIM diff, I could see that the changes were limited to very small parts of the files. The files looked identical side by side in Audacity even at a close zoom.

My solution is to create a headerless WAV dump of the mp3 and then compare the MD5 signatures of each WAV. FFMPEG can do the translation quite easily.

ffmpeg -y -i $mp3 $mp3.wav;
md5sum $mp3.wav

I created a hash with MD5 as key pointing to the original MP3 file spec. Put the wav file on an SSD for speed.

Brute force, but it works.