We all have a small or large collection of MP3 files. These MP3 files could be music, speeches, audio books, radio shows, podcasts or something else. When we play lots of MP3 files in a media player such as XMPlay or VideoLAN VLC Player, we can save the items in the playlist into an M3U or M3U8 playlist file.
In a previous article, we even mentioned how we can create an M3U playlist using a single command. The only difference between the M3U and M3U8 is that the latter supports Unicode and therefore can have list items written in many non-Latin languages. We can check these M3U playlists for duplicate entries using a free tool called Playlist Cleaner.
Playlist Cleaner is a portable program and does not require any installation. It is designed using Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8 which means it can be used on Windows 7, 8 and 10. It has a very simple single window user interface.
In the window of Playlist Cleaner, we can choose the target M3U file by clicking on the Browse button. Once we have picked an M3U file, we can click on the Detect Duplicates button. If it finds any duplicate entries in the playlist, it will list them in groups. For it to work, not only the M3U file must have duplicate entries but also the target MP3 files must exist. Even if two entries in the M3U are identical strings, it will not detect them unless the target files are also identical. The selected MP3 files need not have any ID3 tags or any other kinds of metadata embedded inside them.
We can select the files from the list that we want to remove and click on the Remove Selected Items button. This will remove the entries from the M3U list. We can also save the modified list by clicking on the Save List button.
You can download Playlist Cleaner from https://www.haztek-software.com/applications/playlist-cleaner.