I use a Squeezebox to distribute my digital audio at home. I noticed an issue in Squeezecenter, the audio server, that can cause duplicate detection of songs in your library. If you have your Squeezecenter detect and parse your playlists, your playlists must reference your music using the same path structure that you use in Squeezecenter.

For instance, in the shot below, I have Sqeezecenter looking for music under the path s:completed (a mapped network disk). I also have playlists under s:playlists.

At first, I had my playlists referencing the UNC pathname to my music, so that the mapped drive letter wouldn’t be necessary (as it might be different on different computers). Squeezecenter scanned my playlists and found the file references, but because the pathname was different the software assumed the files were different and indexed them as different files. This resulted in duplicates in my library for all music I had in playlists. To solve this, I just changed the playlist paths so that they matched what I had set in Squeezecenter. A new scan of the library and playlists and Squeezecenter correctly recognized the files as being the same and didn’t produce duplicates.

So in your playlist files, change this:

\storageserverCompletedHard RockWhite ZombieLa Sexorcisto – Devil Music Vol. 15 White Zombie – Soul-Crusher.mp3

To this:

s:CompletedHard RockWhite ZombieLa Sexorcisto – Devil Music Vol. 15 White Zombie – Soul-Crusher.mp3

As an aside, it would be nice to set a UNC network path within Squeezecenter, but it doesn’t currently allow it. I believe an older version did allow you to set your library as a UNC path on the network.