Ask Slashdot: How Do I Scrub Pirated Music From My Collection?

An anonymous reader writes "I tried out Google Music, and I liked it. Google made me swear that I won't upload any 'illegal' tracks, and apparently people fear Apple's iCloud turning into a honeypot for the RIAA. My music collection comprises about 90% 'legal' tracks now — legal meaning tracks that I paid for — but I still have some old MP3s kicking around from the original Napster. Moreover, I have a lot of MP3s that I downloaded because I was too lazy to rip the CD version that I own. I wanted to find a tool to scan my music to identify files that may be flagged as having been pirated by these cloud services; I thought such a tool would be free and easy to find. After all, my intent is to search my own computer for pirated music and to delete it — something that the RIAA wants the government to force you to do. But endless re-phrasing on Google leads to nothing but instructions for how to obtain pirated music. Does such a tool exist or does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?"

Comments

That Anonymous reader works for the RIAA?

[elucido]

And my response is, build it yourself.

Or if you want me to build it for you, pay up. But don't expect the open source community or free software community to build it for free.

(I don't know for a fact that Anonymous reader works for the RIAA but this seems to be just the kind of software they'd want to have.)

That being said, just to show how easy the software would be to design. All you'd have to do is use a sort algorithm. Then simply divide and conquer.
Each mp3 file can be represented by md5. The software could create an internal md5 database. This md5 database could be sorted via a stamping or digital signature algorithm which will create a while or for loop which checks each file for it's status of being (legal) or (illegal). Starting with the files which are legal, these files should be identified first by the algorithm because these files would be easiest to identify. Then when the status is unclear, these files should be sorted by user defined criteria and checked either automatically via comparing with some sort of official database of legal md5s, or manually listened to by the user in which case they should all become one big playlist from which the user can listen and decide whether to wipe it or not.

If you want me to build the software, reply with the price you are willing to pay for its development.