Duplicate WAV Audio Files Removal November 21, 2019July 16, 2020 Raza Ali Kazmi Duplicate Data, Duplicate Music WAV stands for Waveform Audio File Format. It is a container audio file format jointly developed by Microsoft and IBN. It has been widely used to store audio data in segments, particularly on computers. Product Spotlight (Duplicate Files): Use Sorcim’s Clone Files Checker to remove 1000s of duplicate audio files in your PC. Clone Files Checker follows Google Software Principles. It will not ask you to provide email address to download the software. WAV is a Raw file format. It is an uncompressed format where means your data is stored without compressing any content at all. This means that although WAV files do take up more space, they provide premium quality sound results than the compressed sound audio formats, like MP3. WAV files are largely used in the music industry where there is a greater need to retain maximum audio quality. The upper size limit for this format is a staggering 4GB! Typically, WAV files take up 10 MB of disk space per minute of recording. WAV uses the Windows Resource Interchange File Format technology to store data. Almost all major music players support playing the WAV files. You don’t need to download external codecs to play your WAV audio files in Windows Media player, VideoLan (VLC) Media Player, Winamp and QuickTime. Duplicate WAV audio files can make your computer run sluggish like an old computer, aside from making it harder to find the right version of your audio file. When you have multiple instances of the same file, how would you know which one you just modified? Thankfully, this job can be performed pretty well using specialized software such as Clone Files Checker. CFC is a duplicate finder program available for both PC and Mac. It supports finding duplicate WAV files, besides performing scans for duplicate files of all kinds under the sun. Once the scan has been done, Clone Files Checker will club together duplicates into groups, with a single group comprising of all files that are identical to each other. You can then choose which file you want to retain from the duplicate group via the Select Duplicates menu. You can choose to keep the oldest, newest, most modified, least modified, and files located in a specific directory. The final step requires you to opt for deleting the duplicate files permanently or if you want to backup them to a folder. Clone Files Checker uses certain algorithms that compare the actual data in your files and generate hash, unlike most other utilities that merely compare the file names. This assures 100% accuracy. No false positives, no worries of deleting original files. Additionally, you can employ the automatic backup functionality to restore your data at a later point of time if you need it. The backups are always compressed to conserve storage space. You can safely restore previous backups from the History tab which contains a catalog of all the previous scans you have run. Steps to Fix Duplicate WAV Audio Files These are the steps you need to perform to scan and delete duplicate WAV files from your computer. Clone Files Checker (Windows) user interface Download and install Clone Files Checker. Click on the Add button on the left-hand side. Browse and add up a location you want to search for duplicates. You can add as many folders as you need. Set the Search Options in place. Select Custom > Music to search for only duplicate music files. Alternatively, you can use the All Files option to search everything, irrespective of their types. Click on Start Search, and the scan should take place. Select Review & Fix once the scan is successfully completed. Use the Select Duplicates button to choose a selection pattern of your choice, and the Select Action button to move or delete marked duplicates. A Word of Caution While selecting folders to search for duplicates DO NOT add up system and Program Files folders. These folders might contain a lot of duplicates as your system files are interlinked across different applications, which is particularly true for Microsoft .Net Framework. If you’re an avid gamer, you might have already installed Microsoft DirectX and Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable which are essential to run modern PC games. Removing duplicate components of your operating system and program files could cause major performance issues in a related program or prevent it from opening up altogether. Be sure to add up only those directories/ drives for the scan which can be safely purged of duplicates.