I have copied loads of music on to the pc hard drive from my music cds and from other peoples hard drive that they have gave me

Now I have some 37gig of music in all different formats, plus loads of duplicated tracks by the same artists

How can I simply sort them out so I have them all in mp3 format and without the duplicated tracks and without loosing any (other than the duplicated ones)?

If all the tracks follow a common naming sequence, e.g.

Artist - Album - track name

You should find that the Windows File Explorer will sort them automatically

into alphabetical order, and any duplicates will be obvious and can be deleted.

I use the paid-for version of Musicmatch Jukebox (the PLUS version). If you have a reasonable net connection it has a facility called Supertagging which will sort and tag all your music from info it gets from one of the net music databases. It will also download album covers from the net. It's about $20 and worth every penny.

Personally, I use iTunes. If the files have proper id3 tags (with all the artist, album, etc information), you can sort through each field and narrow down your search. Try to add in important missing information.

Along with just eliminating duplicates, it's important to also get rid of bad quality tracks... and the painful task of identifying any songs that don't have the correct labels.

Unfortunately, you are talking about ~10,000 tracks, and cleaning things up after the fact really takes time, no matter what tool you use.