If you are a music lover but you feel that your PC is getting clogged up with a lot of duplicate music files then this simple little free application could be a good choice for you.

The ease with which great songs can now be downloaded and saved to your computer makes it extremely tempting to spend hours looking for both hot new tunes and those half forgotten classic from years ago.

The problem with this is that you can end up with the same song in different places, and sometimes even with a different title and varying tags. Similarity takes this in its stride and works out what files have been duplicated even if the name of the file is different. It does this by checking the characteristics of the files, such as the bit rate and frequency.

Similarity works with most of the type of format you are likely to have on your PC; MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG etc. The first time you run it you may find that it takes a little bit of time to go through your folders, but it doesn't use too much of your computer's resources, meaning that doing something else while this is running in the background is possible.

To get started you need to choose the drives you want to check on a fairly basic looking Window Explorer style interface. The process is extremely to do and once the scanning has been completed you will get a results page with details on the duplicates and potential duplicates which have been found, with the percentage of similarity shown for a couple of different factors (content and ID3 tag). You can then choose to manually remove the songs which you are happy to consider as duplicates.

As well as this free piece of software there is also a paid version with a few extra features. Most music fans will be quick happy with the free program, although maybe DJs and other people who use music for their work might like the ability to automatically delete duplicates which comes with the premium version of Similarity.